Frontiers | Editorial: Trust and Infrastructure in Scholarly Communications | Research Metrics and Analytics

"An ever more connected system of global research information and infrastructure is transforming all aspects of the research process from how we discover and consume content to how we communicate it and the impact that it can have. At the same time, Web 2.0 has given the ability to self-publish to anyone—a tremendous freeing of global communication, but the signal-to-noise ratio has become challenging to manage, and fake news and unreliable information abound. In this new world research participation is becoming more global (both from international and intranational perspectives); research communication is more transparent through the open access, open data, and open science movements; it is becoming ever closer to translation and societal impact as we see through the rise in importance of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, a variety of grand challenge agendas, moonshots, and the adoption of impact into the evaluation environment. Data are at the centre of this change—whether it be the need to handle data volumes, the “shape” and format of data, or data as code and as a fuel for AI—the heart of any technology strategy is not just about how we collect, manipulate, consume and deploy data, but also about how it is structured, who can find it, who has access to it, who has sovereignty over it, and what capacity they have to calculate with it. And, it is more critical than ever that we understand the provenance, context, and bias of data. As data becomes part of our most powerful tools, we have to understand the “error bars” more than ever before. With so much change it is unsurprising that the infrastructures and norms of the research world, which were built in a different time, are under stress. As a result of this impetus to change, infrastructures that have underpinned the research conversation for 350 years are changing and, as such, are vulnerable. There has never been a more important time to consider how we trust the infrastructures that we rely upon, and how those infrastructures can engender trust in communities. Thus, the collection of articles in this Research Topic reflect a diverse range of different perspectives on how the scholarly communications research infrastructure is changing and the issues of trust in both the best and worst of times...."