Everyone involved in scholarly communications touches metadata at some point, even if you don’t call it that. Behind every manuscript submission, every link on the web, every platform launch plan, and every analytics dashboard – lies metadata.

In a recent report surveying executives from 25 leading publishers, metadata was rated as the top element “essential to our business” but the second lowest in terms of capability. Why? Metadata is perceived by publishers as hard to do and even harder to do right. Most content is still tagged manually, which can introduce errors. Metadata’s purpose is to describe content, and as it permeates throughout hundreds or even thousands of platforms, systems, users, countries, mistakes and gaps are passed along too, which means content is often consistently misrepresented.

In this program, as the title suggests, everyone is a metadata fan! We will hear from publishers who describe their journey to enrich metadata and their lessons learned along the way. We’ll also hear from consumers of metadata who will bang the drum for an emphasis on abstracts or acceptance dates (or you name it), and from infrastructure organisations who attempt to collaborate to make it easier for everyone to do better.

What can we each do to invest, prove the ROI and improve the completeness and accuracy of metadata for all research outputs?

Metadata is said to be “a love letter to the future”. Let’s get together for a day and design our future.