As publishers continue to leverage new systems and tools in their efforts to continually improve publishing workflows, additional challenges with inconsistent and inaccurate metadata have emerged. Often this has had the effect of making interoperability between systems and stakeholders more difficult, creating new obstacles and slowing progress. To help address this friction, many leading publishers, service providers, funders, and other stakeholders have leveraged CCC’s Ringgold Identify Database to disambiguate organizational information in the major submission systems, discovery and analytic tools, production systems, current research information systems/grant management systems, and enterprise data hubs.
The Ringgold Identify Database, when leveraged as the primary means of organizational information to support master data management initiatives, connects organizational information across a multitude of internal and external systems. Â In many cases, customers leverage for a variety of purposes – connecting information about institutional customers across their customer relationship management, financial, editorial, production, author, and member-facing systems to provide a holistic view of stakeholder relationships. Â Using this data, organizations can more effectively identify new target audiences and new opportunities with prospective and existing clients, improve customer support for organizations and researchers, and more.
In the transition to Open Access, the importance of accurate, standardized organization affiliation information has never been more apparent given the recent OSTP memo, Plan S and other funder and institutional mandates. It’s paramount that affiliations are accurately matched to understand the implications of these mandates. We have heard time and again that it is critical to have researchers’ affiliation data at more granular levels versus at the top-level of an organization (e.g., Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory versus The University of Chicago). Often researchers assert their organization affiliation at many different points of the research lifecycle, including at the earliest stages of creating the grant proposal all the way through the submission of their research article. In many cases, they are adding this information in free-text fields which results in manual errors (e.g., abbreviations, misspellings, and colloquialisms). For our customers who are developing, managing, and navigating OA programs and policies, the Ringgold hierarchies and descriptive structured metadata about organizations support their efforts to:
- Identify authors eligible for funding under OA Agreements
- Construct, negotiate, and manage effectiveness of OA Agreements
- Monitor compliance with institutional and funder mandates e.g., requirements around data deposition, licensing requirements
- Identify potential conflicts of interest for grant and peer reviewers
- Analyze research impact
Our customers adopt and rely on Ringgold data as the authoritative source of organizational information because of the granular level hierarchies, rich supporting metadata about the organizations, and the high-quality curation and management of the database that preserves the integrity of the data itself. We are dedicated to continuing collaboration with our customers and industry stakeholders to enhance Ringgold Solutions to address challenges and opportunities that arise as the scholarly publishing ecosystem continues to transform.
Learn more about how Ringgold Solutions can help improve your organization’s data quality here.