GigaScience Press Wins Inaugural Crossref Metadata Award
GigaScience Press’ has been awarded one of the first CrossRef MetaData Awards, highlighting the Press as a leader in providing essential information to facilitate discovery, identification, and details of online research articles.
This week GigaScience Press has been announced as a winner at the inaugural Crossref Metadata Awards, recognising efforts in scholarly publishing metadata completeness and enrichment in their journal, GigaByte. Thanks to River Valley Technology’s state-of-the-art (and award winning) publishing platform, we were selected from the nearly 150,000 journals from 22,000 members using Crossref infrastructure for having the highest metadata completeness in the small publishers category.
Presented for the first time at the Crossref Midyear community meeting, the award recognises a commitment to high-quality metadata for the works published and leadership in this domain among Crossref members. Now celebrating its 25th year, Crossref is a not-for-profit organization that helps the global scholarly research community record and connect knowledge through managing metadata for various research objects like articles, books, and datasets. With the primary goal to make research easier to find, cite, link, assess, and reuse.
As an Open Science publisher, GigaScience Press has worked hard to provide open, rich and reusable metadata to address the broader goals of open science and promote a more transparent research ecosystem. Richer metadata makes content more useful, improving discoverability by humans and machines. Making our high-quality peer-reviewed content more ready for artificial intelligence tools in this manner, GigaScience Press also sharing our open content via a text mining portal to facilitate and encourage text and data mining.
These features have only been possible thanks to our partners at River Valley Technologies’ novel XML-first platform which is able to better capture richer metadata and content. This is linked to machine readable text and persistent identifiers (PIDs), along with the supporting research data and the code to dynamic features in the published papers such as interactive figures. As well as improving the readability and accessibility for machines. The platform improves this for humans with integrated multi-lingual support and the ability to view the article in dyslexic-friendly fonts.
To enable these many features metadata quality is an area GigaScience Press have been particularly focussed on, and we are honoured by this recognition. In his acceptance speech at the prize announcement, our Chief Editor Scott Edmunds saying:
“I would particularly like to thank our technical partners at RiverValley Technologies for their very hard work in addressing our exacting standards, their novel publishing platform has been key to all of this.”
Maryam Bazargan, CEO at River Valley Technologies further commented:
“We are proud to have contributed to GigaScience Press’s success in winning this award. Our partnership with GigaScience Press has enabled us to push the boundaries of scholarly publishing. Together, we have delivered a fast, accurate, and cost-effective publishing solution.”
There were six categories in these first Crossref Metadata Awards, with GigaScience Press winning the most competitive small members category (organisations of less than 1 million USD of publishing revenue or expenses). GigaScience Press won thanks to its 82% coverage of key metadata elements across their records for their GigaByte journal, this being higher than any other small publisher, and second highest over all the categories. You can see our Crossref participation report results in real-time, and the reason we dropped some percentage points for our Funding award scores are because the APC costs of the journal are so low we publish a lot of unfunded and self-funded research that does not have recognized funding award numbers.
This focus on high-quality metadata has meant GigaByte has also achieved the DOAJ Seal for journals that demonstrate best practice in open access publishing, and was quickly and easily mirrored and listed in publishing indexes such as PubMed Central, Scopus and Web of Science. This high quality metadata has also enabled easier integration with numerous third-party technical platforms, including OA Switchboard and CLOCKSS. We also have good form in winning prizes, as GigaByte was also a winner of the 2022 ALPSP Award for Innovation in Scholarly Publishing, and GigaScience winning a PROSE Award for Innovation in Publishing in 2018. And GigaByte papers have won their authors a recent Ben Barres Spotlight Award for groups that are underrepresented in biology and medicine.
