Methods & proposal for metadata guiding principles for scholarly communications

This article describes an international community-based effort to create metadata guiding principles for adopting and using richer metadata and advancing its application in scholarly communications. These principles can facilitate the dissemination, discoverability and use/reuse of many types of research and scholarly outputs. While much work remains to be done, these principles serve as a starting point for the evolution of processes that span communities including publishers, researchers, scholars, authors and other creators, librarians, curators, custodians, and consumers of scholarly works. These aspirational Metadata 2020 Principles are designed to encompass the needs of our entire community while ensuring thoughtful, purposeful, and reusable metadata resources. They provide a framework for all of us to be good metadata citizens. They also provide a foundation for considering related work from Metadata 2020 and must be interpreted within the legal and practical context in which we operate. They are intended to guide the broadest possible cross-section of our community in improving research communications, publishing, and discoverability.