Strategies for publishers to make scholarly metadata openly available

(Watch the VIDEO.) Research information, or scholarly metadata, is important for decision making around strategic priorities, distribution of resources, and evaluation of researchers and institutions. It is also used by funders, institutions and governments to assess the effect of policies, and by researchers and societal stakeholders to find and assess research results. The value of openly available research information is increasingly recognized, as it supports fair research assessment and makes it possible for everyone to find and assess relevant research. Publishers play an important role in this context, as they are an important source of scholarly metadata - including bibliographic metadata for the research articles, books and book chapters, and other research outputs they publish. Many publishers make important metadata, including abstracts, authors and affiliations, references and funding information available via Crossref, including persistent identifiers (ORCID, ROR and funder and grant IDs). However, for many research articles, this metadata is still only available through closed, proprietary systems, if at all. This panel brings together a number of approaches to support publishers to make metadata for the articles and other outputs they publish openly available. The panel will present and discuss these approaches, including criteria for success, potential challenges and context-specific considerations. Approaches represented on the panel vary from inclusion of open metadata in publisher negotiations, supporting under-resourced publishers, and the SCOAP3 open science mechanism that financially rewards publishers for open science practices, including open metadata. In addition, removing barriers in publisher workflows, from submission systems to metadata depositing, will be discussed. Given the diversity of publishers in the scholarly communication landscape, from large commercial publishers to scholarly societies and institutional publishers of diamond journals, challenges and solutions for the provision of open scholarly metadata will vary. The panel will invite audience perspectives on the question how publishers can make more and better metadata available as open research information.