In August 2021, UKRI commissioned MoreBrains Cooperative to evaluate the current state of the landscape of descriptive information (metadata) for journal articles and academic long-form content like books, book chapters, and monographs. UKRI’s new open access policy sets out a number of requirements for publications resulting from the research they have funded. Meeting these requirements can often only be achieved or evidenced by the use of descriptive metadata associated with these publications, such as licensing information, persistent identifiers for items and contributors, links to funding grants, and relationships between versions of articles wherever they might be hosted. These requirements have been shaped by a wide community consultation. They represent a broad agreement on what is needed for access to UK publicly-funded research to be as open as possible. The policy sets out two routes to compliant open access: route 1 being to “publish the research article open access in a journal or publishing platform which makes the Version of Record immediately open access via its website”; and route 2 being to “publish the research article in a subscription journal and deposit the Author’s Accepted Manuscript (or Version of Record, where the publisher permits) in an institutional or subject repository at the time of final publication”. MoreBrains analysed the policy text to identify specific pieces of metadata that are required by each of these routes, and then identified common metadata standards and frameworks (or ‘schema’) used in the publishing community (for route 1) and the repository community (for route 2). We examined each candidate schema and established which of the metadata required by the policy are currently present, or missing, from each. For the metadata that is currently present in these schema, we then assessed the availability of information. Not every piece of metadata that could be shared is always present. We endeavoured to gauge the scale and extent of gaps in metadata coming from publishers and repositories, by analysing how often the relevant metadata was present for UK research in two major collections of aggregated information: the Crossref Registry for journal publications; and the CORE database of information from repositories.

This report is part of ongoing work to support the implementation of UKRI's open access policy. It is part of an update that can be found on UKRI's website here: https://www.ukri.org/news/open-access-policy-update-december-2022/