Research product repositories: Strategies for data and metadata quality control

In recent years a significant effort has been spent by R&D institutions and scientific information stakeholders in general to enhance and improve the quality of Open Access initiatives and the performance of the associated services. Nevertheless much work is still needed to tackle pending data quality issues. This paper proposes some functional and organizational solutions, based on the cooperation of all the main actors of the R&D system, which in our view should help improving quality control of data and descriptive metadata stored in research product Open Access (OA) repositories. We think that this strategy could favor a substantial innovation of the document management services offered to the scientific community and to policy makers, ensuring the interoperability between institutional repositories and Current Research Information Systems (CRIS). Particular emphasis is given to the problem of data and metadata indexing and organization with respect to unconventional research products, which represent an important asset in the field of scientific communication.