This is the fifth in a series of blog posts in which CCC shares the analysis, undertaken with Media Growth Strategies, of metadata management across each stage of the research lifecycle with the scholarly community to spark dialogue and drive action. The first four blogs in the series looked at the idea development and proposal preparation, proposal submission, research and authoring, and publication and preservation stages of the research lifecycle.
In our final blog in this series, we will focus on the reuse and measurement stage. During this final stage of the research manuscript lifecycle, researchers, institutions, funders, and publishers are all focused on evaluating the impact of published research, though often through different lenses. Institutions and funders monitor, track, and report on funding compliance while institutions and publishers engaged in OA negotiations assess historical subscription and publication data to inform institutional deals. Publishers also work independently and with reproduction rights organizations (like CCC) to enable appropriate sharing and use of content across a variety of license types.
Although these different groups may have unique challenges in the post-publication stage, there are two over-arching challenges.
Problematic Research Impact Measurement
Due to the lack of adoption of metadata standards, researchers and their associated institutions often find it difficult to track the impact of published articles and thus the collective impact of individual researchers and their institutions in a particular discipline over time. As a result, decisions about researcher rewards and recognition, as well as future funding opportunities, may be based on incomplete or inaccurate data— affecting the reputation and career advancement of researchers. For government funders, this lack of metadata leads to incomplete analysis to support future funding investments and to report activities to the public.
Problematic Deal Modeling
For institutions and publishers pursuing gold OA through consolidated agreements, the lack of consistent affiliation and funding data makes modeling future agreements difficult. Data is not standardized across publisher platforms, which creates unnecessary manual work to gather and normalize data for use in institutional analysis. This manual work makes the transition to modern models of OA publication onerous and error-prone, extending one-off author payments and limiting the availability of open outputs that can advance scientific discoveries. The delayed transition to OA also puts some publishers at risk of losing authors because of funding mandates (think Plan S eliminating support for OA publication in hybrid titles), which in turn may result in lost revenue.
Guide to Metadata Management Across the Research Lifecycle
Interested in seeing the full research report? A key artifact CCC developed by leveraging the data and insights we gained from this study is the State of Scholarly Metadata interactive report. This report guides you through metadata management—highlighting the challenges, related impacts, and key decision points.
This is the last in a five-part series of blogs in which CCC shares metadata analysis with the scholarly community to spark dialogue and drive action with respect to metadata management during each stage of the research lifecycle. To learn more, visit The State of Scholarly Metadata where we also invite you to provide your input through the feedback function.