METADATA, human beings, and "COMPLETENESS"

Mike Nason
Open Scholarship & Publishing Librarian @ UNB Libraries
Crossref/Metadata Liaison @ PKP

introduction(s)

i'm the open scholarship & publishing librarian (aka, i guess, "scholarly communications") at what, to most of you, would be a pretty small school in atlantic canada (university of new brunswick).

my job, plainly, is to help make the research that happens at my institution as available to the public as possible.

i also work for pkp as a member of their publishing services team, where i am the crossref/metadata liaison.

i ended up in this role because I have a lot of opinions.

like a lot of people with abundant opinions, i look like this:

i am a [white, cis] settler from the unceded (aka, stolen) territory of the mi'kmaq-wolastoquey peoples just a short hop from the wolastoq river, a much cooler name than the settler-crowned “saint john river”, if you ask me.

that river is up here, next to maine – a state you rarely think about unless you are mad at senator susan collins (not to be confused with my pal and co-presenter susan collins).

susan collins is exceptionally great at finding excuses for you to be mad at her, so you may have many reasons to know where – roughly – she is from...

i'm about to rocket through the following:

• life as a metadata wonk (librarian)
• life as a metadata support worker (pkp)
  • efforts at pkp
  • pkp & crossref
• coming to terms with reality

I spend a frankly upsetting amount of time thinking about metadata problems

things like...

• how can you incentivize more diligence with metadata?
• could that question be nerdier?
• is the problem literacy?
• is the problem time?
• is the problem labour?
• do i mostly wish metadata were better so that my job would be easier?
  • yes.
• who decides what is important?

• is the metadata we want equitable?
• is the metadata we want eurocentric/anglocentric?
  • bigtime
• there should just one citation style
• names should be single strings
• that might be possible were it not for the iron grip of citation styles
• why does anyone still care about citation styles?

IT is clear from the conference schedule that this is an affliction many of us share

~47 sessions
~14 about "hygiene"
~30% !!

a lot of us wish metadata fidelity were better than it is. imagine all the cool things we could do if we were omniscient!

a diligent, accurate world without typos!

a diligent, accurate world with a clear view of the whole lifecycle of any research project and products, properly attributed! 🤓

a world where people listen to librarians 😌

a world where people listen to librarians care about metadata as much as we do 😌

a world where people have time 🤔

i'm about to rocket through the following:

• life as a metadata wonk (librarian)
• life as a metadata support worker (pkp)
  • efforts at pkp
  • pkp & crossref
• coming to terms with reality

a day in the life

i spend a lot of time explaining to researchers how their metadata gets passed between publishers and systems. orcid, repositories, openaire, crossref, datacite, cris platforms...

and! a lot of time explaining the ways in which metadata happens to them.

folks are generally receptive!

• digital publishing services
• journal hosting
• scholar profiles and repositories
• pids and open infrastructure
• responsible sharing of works
• funder mandates
• assessing publications
• research data management
• publishing & metadata literacy

a day in the life

and, like so many others...

i have spent the better part of the last ten years of my career/life trying to convince people to engage in a public good (open access) by finding hooks to prove that this is good for their careers.

researchers do, i think, care about this stuff. there's also just a lot of things to care about.

a day in the life

squaring the fact that no amount of being right will change the reality that the demands on researchers are more intense/elaborate/complicated/extractive than they've ever been.

• job precarity
• extensive competition
• committee/service work
• increased teaching workloads
• extensive pressure to publish
• neoliberal admin cutting $$
• neoliberal admin boiling people down to numbers
• chatGPT
• bureaucracy
• paying out of pocket to publish*
• doing more with less

a day in the life

saying, "if you just jump through these hoops, your work will be:

• compliant
• discoverable
• ethical
• easier to track
• easier to cite
• accessible
• preserved
• without apc charges... "

each with a caveat.

each with one more thing.

"remember, i am here to help."

i say this a lot

my job is to stand on the end of a dock and throw rocks at a cruise ship in order to make it change direction.

any day i hit the boat is a good day.

often, i am thrilled just to be heard. a world where people listen to librarians.

this means i see a lot of nods of acknowledgement when i talk to faculty, and about 10-20% of that results in meaningful change.

i guess i'm saying that if i let my expectations get ahead of me, i'm setting myself up to resent both myself and the researchers i work with.

what capacity exists for "widening participation" in this space?

an ounce of prevention

is worth a pound of cure

28.35 grams of prevention

is worth 0.45 kilograms of cure

😕

i'm about to rocket through the following:

• life as a metadata wonk (librarian)
• life as a metadata support worker (pkp)
  • efforts at pkp
  • pkp & crossref
• coming to terms with reality

I also work for pkp.

Folks know PKP, right?

public knowledge project

pkp is a not-for-profit organization at/with simon fraser university in british columbia, canada. they produce free, open-source software to disseminate research and manage the entire scholarly publishing workflow.

• open journal systems
  • > 34,000 journals worldwide
• open monograph press
• open preprint systems

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from pkp beacon data, 2022

public knowledge project

pkp also turns 25 this year! 🎉

pkp & crossref

pkp is also a crossref sponsoring organization, and can act as a membership representative for pkp|ps “enterprise” clients or eligible publishers/organizations/journals (via crossref's gem program) using ojs who are not able to join directly due to financial, administrative, or technical barriers.

pkp currently sponsors ~156 crossref memberships

a day night in the life

the majority of my work with pkp is related to metadata, persistent identifiers, and ojs support.

ojs is software that is built to meet the needs of journals in any country, language and discipline.

there are a lot of languages (most of them aren't english! what?!) and every discipline has their own, unique publishing culture.

as you might guess, this means i spend a lot of time explaining how metadata works to the folks who operate journals. most of these folks are also researchers.

i also advocate for better metadata internally, which developers love.

a night in the life

in particular, this means explaining why good metadata is important and the ways that metadata is consumed downstream.

in practice, this means i write a lot of emails that say things like:

no, i don't recommend putting a doi in your article title field. i know you want it to appear on the table of contents but it would be disasterous for a variety of reasons.

a night in the life

a great deal of the mistakes in metadata i see come from the following:

• users mistaking metadata for styling elements
• users carrying disciplinary or citation-style baggage into metadata elements
• required fields forcing fake metadata
• names are terrible
• creative applications of multilingual metadata
• lack of literacy with the platform and available options

a night in the life

a great deal of the mistakes in metadata i see come from the following:

a user trying to do something unrelated to the metadata itself

vestigial practices from print media

a user making do with the fields they're given to express meaning

a night in the life

many of these journals are small operations with minimal staff...

the promise of open source and open access is/was to wrest control of scholarly communications from major publishers and back into the hands of researchers.

and so, those same researchers are now responsible for the labour of publishing.

pkp's approach

• get the software as good as we can get it without raising barriers (you can't require completeness)
• provide documentation for better practices and recommendations
• community support forum
• empowering users
• look for avenues to make users more capable metadata contributors
• hit the boat with a rock

• documentation interest group
• cfi and coalition publica collaboration to create "better practices in journal metadata" documentation
• working with crossref to make DOIs as "automagical" as possible :)

i'm about to rocket through the following:

• life as a metadata wonk (librarian)
• life as a metadata support worker (pkp)
  • efforts at pkp
  • pkp & crossref
• coming to terms with reality

WE expect a lot from exhausted people!

"completeness" requires labour.

But for whom?

will "completeness" require more effort for non-english speaking researchers?

when we discuss "widening particpation", what shape does a fair distribution of labour take? 

Is worrying about metadata more my job or the responsiblity of researchers?

ultimately...

we can (as service providers/librarians)

• educate
• provide resources/guidance
• promote "better" practices
• find ways to make the work easier
• get out of the way
• be patient
• assess expectations

thank you 🙌