Scholarly Metadata as Trust Signals: Opportunities for Journal Editors - Science Editor

"It should be noted that the presence of a persistent identifier for a scholarly output in itself is not a signal of quality—a digital object identifier (DOI) only indicates that the item exists. Rather, it is the presence (or absence) of metadata associated with the scholarly output that serves as evidence of how the creators, or stewards, of these items ensure the quality of their content. 

Crossref is an organization that enables its members to create and register persistent identifiers (Crossref DOIs) for their publications and to cross-reference the works. When members deposit their content with Crossref, they provide the basic bibliometric metadata related to scholarly publications, such as article title, publication date, names of authors, journal title, name of the conference, and volume or issue number.⁶ We also recommend the inclusion of authors’ affiliations (preferably as Research Organisations Registry [ROR] IDs—more about those later) and ORCiDs, the abstract, and the list of references—all of which assist discoverability, as well as provide better context about the work at hand. Additional information, such as funding metadata, the relationships between objects (e.g., “is preprint of”, “is review of”, “is funded by”),⁶ and clinical trial numbers (where relevant), offer even more insight into how that scholarly output came about. The presence of this information means the metadata can tell us who authored a particular work, who funded it, where was the research carried out, what the relationship is between this work and a particular dataset, and so much more. Works such as journal articles may undergo changes even after publication. Additional information may be added to them, they may undergo a correction, or they might be retracted. Metadata that signifies these updates are essential in maintaining the integrity of the scholarly record as they ensure scholars are reading and citing the most up-to-date work...."