The Metadata Imperative: Building Interoperable Infrastructure for Research Integrity, Discovery, and Author Experience

Session Description

Metadata fragmentation across disconnected systems and lifecycle stages is one of scholarly publishing's greatest ongoing infrastructure challenges. When metadata fails to travel seamlessly from submission through publication, discovery, and impact measurement, every stakeholder suffers: authors repeat data entry across platforms, editors manually transfer information between systems, institutions struggle to track output, funders can't measure ROI, research integrity tools work with incomplete data, discovery platforms index partial records, and readers face barriers to evaluating research quality and context. This session explores how upstream investment in integrated metadata infrastructure creates cascading benefits across the publishing lifecycle. We'll examine real-world implementations demonstrating how centralized, interoperable metadata enables automated research integrity screening, frictionless author workflows, funder compliance reporting, enhanced content discovery, and improved reader context. Drawing on experience from platforms processing millions of submissions annually and hosting content for leading publishers, we'll discuss what works, what doesn't, and where standards development is most needed.