The impact of technological change on the standards ecosystem means standards publishers need to adopt new technologies faster and adapt their publishing toolchains to better meet the needs of increasingly digital consumers. Solutions in the past have focused on transforming standards documents into machine-consumable content and exploiting AI to deliver more value. However, in a risk-averse industry, are there smaller steps publishers can take now? Absolutely. In this post, I will focus on an essential step that publishers could take immediately, regardless of their progress towards digital standards.
Adopting FAIR Principles
The answer lies in a long-standing standard (pun intended) practice in STM publishing: adopting FAIR principles for metadata. FAIR data principles — making data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable — are “essential elements that allow organizations to maximize the value of their digital assets.” While some SDOs leverage FAIR principles to some extent, they are not fully maximizing the potential value.
The Importance of Customer Empathy
Implementing FAIR principles requires the same kind of customer empathy as the transition to digital standards which I have written about before. When time matters and resources are scarce, standards publishers must minimize the friction between creating a digital asset and a customer using it. Stakeholders derive the most value from the usage of standards. The end user, the publisher, the regulator, the expert, and the consumer buying the end user’s products or services all rely on discovering, accessing, and using relevant standards.
The Role of Metadata
Metadata supports all of these activities. Well-structured, comprehensive, industry-standard metadata amplifies them. The lack of commonly adopted identifiers and formats among standards publishers can push customers towards either aggregators or into non-adoption, particularly in the micro and SME end-users market, which is arguably the largest untapped market in standards publishing. And I don’t simply mean that publishers should create notification services as an add-on to a subscription. Adopting open data principles and tools would enable other systems and developers to integrate standards into real-world use cases more easily.
Existing Tools and Techniques
Most tools and techniques for a FAIR metadata standards ecosystem already exist. However, as with other areas of digital transformation, standards publishers often struggle to practice what they preach. Components of such a FAIR metadata system, such as Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs), Dublin Core, SKOS, and RDF, are not widely adopted or understood by standards publishers. Those that do adopt them tend not to publicize them too much. Additionally, standards publishers tend to look inward before looking outward, leading to poorly adopted or understood standards like Standards-Specific Ontology (SSOS) or ICS codes. We need to focus on making our data interoperable and semantically useful. And that means looking out before we look in.
Monetizing Data Services
While some publishers have monetized data services, most still rely on public discovery at some stage in the publishing workflow, such as public review of drafts. This openness builds trust and market credibility. Content would be more credible and valuable if the related metadata actively built that trust, with provenance, access, and rights information presented in a well-formatted, consistent manner using schemas and identifiers that make sense externally.
The Shift Towards Open Data
The world is moving towards open data. It is not the data itself that brings value, but the insights derived from it. For example, “A standard has changed that I need to adjust my workflow for,” “A standard has been proposed or published that matches my use case,” or “Regulation I need to follow now references this standard.” Gatekeeping this information is destructive in the mid-term in my view. As I often say, “Our competition is not another standards publisher; our competition is ignorance or, worse, indifference.”
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