The Metadata 2020 initiative is an ongoing effort to bring various scholarly communications stakeholder groups together to promote principles and standards of practice to improve the quality of metadata. To understand the perspectives and practices of the main stakeholder groups (librarians, publishers, researchers and repository managers) regarding metadata, the Metadata 2020 Researcher Communications Project Group conducted a survey in the summer of 2019. The survey content was generated by representatives from the stakeholder groups who are active in this Metadata 2020 project.

This dataset contains the excel spreadsheet with all of the raw, unanalyzed responses of the survey that was distributed, following IRB approval, to a broad number of communities. The questions were answered by participants self-identifying as researchers, publishers, librarians, and repository managers. The purpose of these questions was to assess how metadata is understood by stakeholders in the scholarly communications life cycle. To the designers’ best knowledge, no other survey had previously attempted to analyze knowledge about, and perceptions of metadata associated with publication. The survey was conceived as a primary output by the Metadata 2020 Researcher Communications Project and the survey instrument was developed with the assistance of stakeholder groups active in Metadata 2020.

Complete responses are included among the four stakeholder groups: librarians, researchers, repository managers, and publishers. Each stakeholder group is represented with its own tab. In addition, one tab contains all of the responses, another the demographics for the survey. The responses in these tabs may include incomplete responses. Two other tabs contain comparisons of how each stakeholder group has self-prioritized metadata fields and metadata schema.

Links to survey questions and analyzed data can be found in the supplemental materials.

The survey was released for public participation on June 5, 2019 and closed Monday, July 15, 2019. Participants were notified via direct emails of personal contacts, social media (Twitter, Facebook), blogs, listservs, and online newsletters (Referrer). A total of 222 submitted responses were received from 23 countries. Responses were evaluated for completeness, and any (n=11) that were mostly blank responses were not further analyzed. The analyzed set in total was 211 respondents. Sixty-four respondents provided their names and contact information for follow-up questions as needed (to clarify free responses). No respondents were contacted for clarification. 

Complete responses among the four stakeholder groups: librarians, researchers, repository managers, and publishers. Since the question sets were specific to the target stakeholder group, each group’s data is summarized separately. Where possible and with care to avoid the risk of losing meaning, free responses were coded into categories to aid in identification of themes or classes of responses. 

This document contains the excel spreadsheet with all of the raw, unanalyzed responses to the Metadata 2020 Survey. Complete responses are included among the four stakeholder groups: librarians, researchers, repository managers and publishers. Each stakeholder group is represented with its own tab. In addition, one tab contains all of the responses, another the demographics for the survey. The responses in these tabs may include incomplete responses. Two other tabs contain comparisons of how each stakeholder group has self-prioritized metadata fields and metadata schema.

Supplemental Materials

Survey Questions

The survey tool was designed to gain better insights about the familiarity and usage of metadata by several scholarly communications stakeholders. the survey was reviewed by the UAB Office of the IRB. This supplemental document contains the questions that were asked.

Summary Results

A summary document of methods and results serves as a companion to this dataset. It represents an analyzed data set of the raw data collected for the Metadata 2020 survey. The purpose of the data summary is to draw attention to the unique responses of each stakeholder group.