In recent years, research integrity issues are in the limelight with the emergence of new and complex threats, such as paper mills, citation cartels, fabricated peer reviews, fake papers, artificial intelligence–generated images, among many others.1-4 A worrying feature of these emerging research integrity threats is that they often occur at scale and can affect many journals and articles at the same time. Taken together, this poses a considerable challenge to journal editors and editorial offices, which are key stakeholders in ensuring the integrity of the work they publish.
Source: 10.36591/SE-4704-10
Scholarly metadata is an important tool that can be used in the endeavor to protect research integrity, especially to uphold the integrity of the scholarly record. The term “scholarly record” refers to the complex and interconnected network of published outputs (e.g., journal articles, books), the inputs that go into the creation of these outputs (e.g., datasets, preprints), and the metadata for these outputs.5 Preserving the integrity of the scholarly record is important because the scholarly record provides the foundation on which the global scholarly community can continue to build. When relationships between research outputs are not explicit, or when the metadata about these outputs are either incomplete or outdated, there is a risk that the scholarly community will not be able to access the most up to date information.
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
