Tracking research across the fields - Research Information

"The key to finding research is good metadata: information about the books, articles and so on that researchers produce. Developed by UKOLN at the UK's University of Bath, with input from Chygrove and funding from Jisc, a new Metadata Application Profile and Guidance for repositories called RIOXX will be launching in April 2013 and will make this process easier and more reliable. Over the years various metadata schemas and models have emerged, but clarity on the best metadata strategy to adopt or how to achieve interoperability between scholarly systems has been a hard nut to crack. Rather than trying to harmonise the whole of the scholarly metadata landscape, Jisc decided to focus on a particular use case - the ability to track research outputs across systems. We then started to ask what would be the essential, minimum and common fields required to allow the tracking of research outputs. After discussions with research funders, institutional repository managers and research managers, it was clear that being able to efficiently and consistently track research outputs was a common problem. Time and effort could be saved if this could be resolved. Funders want to track outputs associated with their grants, universities want to track outputs associated with their researchers, researchers want to have their admin burden reduced, and track their own outputs. Publishers, data archives, repositories, funders and others want to provide services based on good quality metadata. In surveying the landscape, we found that metadata implementation has been mixed. Some repositories have customised their metadata fields according to their requirements but not necessarily followed known metadata schemas to do so. Some may have adopted known schemas and others have simply opted to accept the default ‘out of the box’ metadata from the software solution. The use of schemas and also vocabularies associated with particular fields (restricted set of keywords/classifications) has been patchy at best. So, given the patchy adoption of previous approaches, the RIOXX Metadata Application Profile and associated software improvements really needed to be pragmatic and implementable across the board. The first step in the process was to focus on applying consistency on two key sets of metadata fields, namely project ID (grant number) and funder name. Reliably linking funding information with research outputs will benefit anyone needing to track research across scholarly systems ..."