Reframing the returns on metadata investments through discoverability, usage, and analytics

Abstract

The interactions among metadata, content discoverability, and content usage have been undervalued by publishers for years. Despite the regular exhortations by librarians to encourage publishers to develop a good metadata program, it remains very difficult for them to make a robust business case for a positive return on investment from metadata creation and maintenance. However, with the ever-growing body of open access research and the production of datasets, blogs, websites, and other unique research outputs, it is an ideal time to revisit how metadata directly affects discovery and usage in the scholarly communications ecosystem. Certain pieces of metadata make demonstrable differences for helping or hindering end-user engagement, can increase or suppress usage, and, therefore, can be one of the keys to driving the business case for supporting open access and non-traditional scholarly outputs. Better metadata is key to gathering robust analytics on user-engagement.