6 minute read.Metadata in editorial workflows
Background
Scholarly metadata, deposited by thousands of our members and made openly available can act as “trust signals” for the publications. It provides information that helps others in the community to verify and assess the integrity of the work. Despite having a central responsibility in ensuring the integrity of the work that they publish, editorial teams tend not be fully aware of the value of metadata for integrity of the scholarly record. How can we change that?
Thousands of publishers and institutions from all over the world, big and small, are Crossref members, providing us rich metadata for their publications. During our discussion with the community on this topic, it has surfaced that it is usually the technical or production teams, which interact closely with Crossref, where the appreciation of benefits and value of metadata remain confined.
Although editors may interact with some aspects of metadata when they screen manuscripts that come their way, it is not evident whether they see metadata as useful for signalling trust. In the last couple of years, we have been specifically engaging with editors, meeting them, speaking to them, and writing for them on this topic. As next steps in this effort, we are now keen to engage with the diverse editorial community to understand where metadata fits in their workflows, and to identify opportunities for providing visibility to the importance of rich metadata.
To get a better grasp on this subject, I reached out to Christine Ferguson, to share her rich experience across many editorial roles with me, and to try and paint a better picture of the mutual gaps in understanding when it comes to publication metadata. Here’s what we discovered about the different editorial roles and some ideas for how Crossref might better engage with editors.
We know that
Our members come in all shapes and sizes, and that is also reflected in the diversity of editorial functions that may exist within their organisations. Some of our publishing members have editorial staff whose role is to screen submissions, which includes checking them to make sure that the manuscripts are formatted correctly, and have all the required information e.g. on ethics approvals, or ORCIDs (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) of authors. They then pass these manuscripts on to an external or an academic editor, who is usually a subject matter expert and is responsible for the editorial oversight of the content, to manage the rest of the peer review process, such as assessing the novelty and scope of the work, inviting and securing reviewers, and making a final decision on the manuscript. The academic editors make up a vast majority of the editorial community, variously serving as the editor-in-chief, section editors, and members of the editorial board. They usually volunteer their time as an editor, while having another primary job function.
Other publishers may have in-house editors who are subject matter experts themselves and manage the peer review process. Manuscripts can come to these editors after initial checks have been performed on them or the editors may also perform these checks, following which selected manuscripts undergo the peer review process.
Production editors assume responsibility for the manuscripts that are accepted. Their role is to make the manuscript production and publication ready, often liaising with the authors to finalise the formatting, and finally assigning it to an issue.
Then there are editorial roles that may be a combination of one or more of the above. The size and operational structure of an organisation may determine how editorial and other responsibilities are delegated within the organisation. For some of our medium or smaller members, it may be that the same individual or team is responsible for one or more tasks related to assessing the scientific content of the manuscript, managing the peer review process, as well as being in charge of the post-production workflows such as registering metadata with Crossref.
There are also emerging publishing workflows involving solicited peer-reviews of preprints or other types of works, which sometimes retain a form of editorial oversight.
In summary, editorial roles and responsibilities may vary quite a lot within our member organisations and we have less clarity about editorial roles and responsibilities within member organisations.
All of these different flavors of editors also interact with metadata at various stages in their workflows. For example, the title of the manuscripts, names of authors, whether they have ORCIDs and what is reflected in their ORCID records, and the abstracts may be used to assess the novelty and integrity of the work under consideration. The names of authors, especially if they are not known personally to the editor, can be verified in part by an ORCID check, ensuring the individuals exist, are affiliated to the organisations as claimed, that they have the relevant expertise to write or contribute to the manuscript, and to be able to find what they have written previously on the subject.
Making sure that whether all or some of the authors (e.g. the corresponding author) have provided their ORCIDs, or if the link to where the dataset has been deposited in a repository resolves correctly, is usually a part of the pre-screening or post-acceptance checklists. As our recent metadata awardee, ASM has highlighted that having this metadata can be hugely beneficial during the peer-review management process, such as for identifying conflicts of interest, to ensure data policy compliance, and even for carrying out systematic analyses.
We’d like to know more about…
whether all editors interact with metadata in their workflows, and whether they are sufficiently informed about the power of rich metadata. It is evident that there is a lot of diversity in editorial roles and functions. Editors, whether they are mostly concerned with scientific content or with the manuscript peer-review process, are closely connected to the researcher community and the latest research topics and trends. By virtue of this, they are in an excellent position to ascertain the important metadata elements most relevant in their scholarly community. If we have a better understanding of how editors are using metadata in their workflows, we’d be able to identify specific opportunities for engaging with this key community to create greater recognition of the role of metadata in preserving the integrity of the scholarly record.
What we have in mind is to engage systematically with editorial community members and understand from them how, where, and which metadata are they using in their workflows. We’d like to do so by talking to editors who represent different Crossref members, perhaps in small groups, where participants will be able to share which metadata elements they interact with. We’d also like to share with them information about the use of metadata for research integrity. We’d like to understand whether they have been leveraging metadata in this context and the relevance of this information for them. Via this exercise, we hope to pick out some commonalities about the use of metadata in editorial workflows. Ultimately, we’d like to use this information to create resources that can be used for educating editors (and ultimately the researchers who submit their work for publication) about the importance of metadata, especially in signalling trust and preserving the integrity of the scholarly record.
