At this year’s NISO Plus 2022 conference, I was part of a fantastic panel discussion, hosted by Hannah Heckner, Director of Product at Silverchair, and moderated by CCC’s own Christopher Kenneally.
Joined by Diane Cogan, Vice President, Global Sales, Ringgold; Georgie Field, Associate Publisher, PLOS; and Steven Vidovic, Head of Open Research & Publication Practice, University of Southampton, UK, we discussed how metadata are crucial to measuring the socioeconomic impact of open research and enabling equity and inclusion in research funding. We explored how Open Access facilitates global collaboration today, and how far we still have to go to connect researchers to research output.
For instance, let’s look at persistent IDs. When things like author affiliation, funder IDs, and grant IDs are present in metadata, it opens tremendous opportunity and efficiency for stakeholders across the ecosystem. However, as I pointed out during the panel, research output is too often missing one or more of these critical elements. The implications of this, from an Open Access perspective, are uncertainty around author eligibility for OA funding, lost opportunities to track research impact and transform publishing business models, and there’s increased costs for publishers, funders, and institutions.
The good news is that we’re seeing positive movement through the contributions of many, leading to more meaningful outcomes across the scholarly ecosystem:
- Authors across the globe are more informed about opportunities to publish Open Access
- Researchers can more easily discover early stage research and identify collaborators, accelerating scientific discovery
- Funding options under pure OA agreements and transformative deals are clearer and more fully utilized
- Funders and institutions can better assess the impact of research, funding policies, and map future strategies
- Trust and transparency are strengthened
Below are more insights and takeaways from the perspectives of my fellow NISO panelists:
Diane Cogan, Vice President, Global Sales, Ringgold
Georgie Field, Associate Publisher, PLOS
Steven Vidovic, Head of Open Research & Publication Practice, University of Southampton, UK
You can watch the full session here and learn more of what happened at NISO Plus here. Thank you to NISO for featuring this session and all participants for bringing their unique perspectives from different areas of the scholarly publishing community to this important conversation.