Data enrichment

The field of scholarly publishing is ever evolving, with the standards and recommended practices that enable interaction between systems and between organizations continually being updated.   

To ensure we’re always aligned with the latest leading practices, we’re an active adopter and participant in National Information Standards Organization (NISO), the not-for-profit organization that identifies, develops, maintains, and publishes technical standards to manage information.  

In 2019, we implemented NISO Journal Article Tag Suite version 1.2, which provides the technical foundation to support many of the content enrichment projects and initiatives that are benefiting Taylor & Francis and Routledge journals across disciplines. 

We’re participating in NISO working groups, supporting the development of future versions of JATS, and preparing to implement JATS version 1.3 in 2021.   

Taylor & Francis strives to not only keep pace with new developments in the industry, but also to contribute in efforts that push for improvements to research communication. 

Read on for more ways we’re using information standards to enrich research.  

Author and contributor metadata 

Contribution to research matters to everyone involved in the research process. That’s why we have several projects underway to improve how authors and other contributors are identified, so everyone receives the appropriate credit for their work.  

Author name changes
We introduced a policy for updating author name changes in published articles. This policy, based on Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidance, importantly seeks to protect authors’ privacy while ensuring that the author’s name is updated in all relevant places. This includes updating author names in the published Version of Record and updating metadata that is distributed to Crossref and indexing services. We are also supporting a new NISO project that will create a recommended practice within the industry for updating author name changes. 

Contributor roles
Also underway is the implementation of Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT), a high-level taxonomy that describes each contributor’s role in a scholarly output. CRediT was recently approved as NISO Standard, and has been adopted by ORCID. By implementing CRediT, articles that are published by Taylor & Francis will be able to include CRediT roles in their metadata when this information is provided by the authors. CRediT is also already implemented by our colleagues at F1000Research.  

Author affiliations
Enhancing article metadata by adding persistent identifiers to author affiliations is another area of development. Affiliation metadata that have persistent identifiers, such as ROR ID, make it possible to unambiguously identify institutions and organizations that an author or article is associated with. Adding persistent identifiers to affiliations in article metadata will make it easier to associate an article with the institutions and organizations that supported the research.  

Group authors
Reflecting the collaborative nature of today’s research workflow, we’re also improving our support for group authors (organizations or collaborations that are credited with authorship). Collaborative group authors usually require special attention during the production process to ensure that the group is correctly represented in the published article, the article metadata, and indexing services. Improving this involves changes to our production processes and systems, and an update to the NISO JATS standard.  

Linking research data with articles 

As part of our goal to advance open research, we have several initiatives underway which promote data availability and improve the linking of journal articles with the data and software that was used in performing the research. This includes publishing data note articles, encouraging authors to provide Data Availability Statements and include data citations and software citations in their reference lists, and implementing a framework for data sharing policies.  

These initiatives include work to develop policies and provide guidance to authors, and developments to back-end systems and processes. Plus, we’re partnered with Research Data Alliance and regularly contribute to Force 11 and NISO working groups.  

License metadata 

Taylor & Francis has been including license metadata in Crossref records for open access articles to comply with CHORUS for many years. Our current enhancements are focused on adding appropriate license metadata to Crossref records for subscription content and content that is free to read, alongside participating in the STM Article Sharing Framework, based on NISO Access & License Indicators (ALI) and NISO Journal Article Versions (JAV).  

Accessibility metadata 

We are working to improve the accessibility of journal articles for all readers. A number of improvements related to accessibility have already been implemented. Current work includes expanding the successful alternative text (alt-text) pilot to more journals, improving online correction environments so that authors can update alt-text for figures during the proof stage, creating guidance for authors on how to write effective alternative text, and creating validation rules to ensure that alt-text meets minimum thresholds for quality. In addition, eReader  provides an improved reading experience for all readers.  

Vincent Lizzi, Head of Information Standards, Taylor & Francis Group