Scholarly Metadata as Trust Signals: Opportunities for Journal Editors

In recent years, research integrity issues are in the limelight with the emergence of new and complex threats, such as paper mills, citation cartels, fabricated peer reviews, fake papers, artificial intelligence–generated images, among many others.1-4 A worrying feature of these emerging research integrity threats is that they often occur at scale and can affect many journals and articles at the same time. Taken together, this poses a considerable challenge to journal editors and editorial offices, which are key stakeholders in ensuring the integrity of the work they publish. Scholarly metadata is an important tool that can be used in the endeavor to protect research integrity, especially to uphold the integrity of the scholarly record. The term “scholarly record” refers to the complex and interconnected network of published outputs (e.g., journal articles, books), the inputs that go into the creation of these outputs (e.g., datasets, preprints), and the metadata for these outputs.5 Preserving the integrity of the scholarly record is important because the scholarly record provides the foundation on which the global scholarly community can continue to build. When relationships between research outputs are not explicit, or when the metadata about these outputs are either incomplete or outdated, there is a risk that the scholarly community will not be able to access the most up to date information. Metadata provide critical context about published works.5 By doing this, it acts as a marker for trustworthiness. Crossref provides infrastructure that allows those who create scholarly outputs to provide metadata for these outputs. […]