A watch is handy for meeting trains and catching planes, but a compass will get you where you’re going.

2023 London Book Fair Panel

As part of the London Book Fair’s Research & Scholarly Publishing Forum, CCC presented, “Reading the Data Compass: The guiding role of metadata in an increasingly complex scholarly research ecosystem.”

Like the earth itself, scholarly publishing has a true north and a magnetic north. The axis of the scientific world is firmly fixed on research. The pole is variable, and in our time, has shifted to open.

The open publishing compass for knowing the direction of our travel is metadata – the stuff about data. This instrument uses persistent IDs (PIDs) to recognize authors, funders, and institutions – details that are necessary for managing workflow and that are critical in a pressurized publishing environment that includes funder mandates, data policies, and expectations for interoperability.

Two weeks ago, PLOS released another six months of data for a public dataset identifying and quantifying Open Science practices including preprint posting, data sharing and code sharing. Dan Shanahan, Publishing Director at Public Library of Science, told CCC’s Chris Kenneally where the Open Science Indicators (OSIs) tell us we are headed.

Dr. José Salm, professor at Santa Catarina State University in Brazil, described development of the Lattes platform, a data management platform named for physicist Cesar Lattes. Today, Lattes has almost 8 million users in Brazil and from other countries.

Matt Cannon, Head of Open Research with Taylor & Francis Group, co-authored a paper for the Learned Publishing journal about the impact of introducing a data sharing policy that was Open & FAIRfindable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable – on six T&F earth and environmental science journals.

As the London Book Fair opened, CCC launched the State of Scholarly Metadata: 2023, an interactive, visual report, based on a study of metadata management across the research lifecycle drawn from interviews with dozens of industry stakeholders. The report depicts the economic and social impact of fragmented metadata supply chain on the journey to Open Access.

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