Typos, Misspellings and Other Accidents: Metadata Accuracy as a Measure of Publisher Quality

Appraising the quality and legitimacy of academic journals and publishers is often challenging for academic stakeholders. Debates over defining “predatory publishing” continue to be heated, especially since the academic status and legitimacy of publishers and scholars are being contested. Our research proffers metadata accuracy as an empirical measure of quality (or lack thereof) of academic journals and publishers. Using a dataset of 1,301,898 articles from 2,305 journals published by ten relatively new Open Access publishers, we identify 1,684 articles with metadata typos. Typos provide unique, candid insight into quality control processes of journals and publishers. In some cases, typos provide clues suggesting how and why mistakes occur, while also revealing quality control failures that underpin published typos. Some publishers exhibited much higher propensities for typos than others, revealing institutional and quality differences between publishers. Articles with authors from less-wealthy and scientifically peripheral countries were also more prone to typos. Metadata quality is an axis of inequality in modern science, since less-wealthy, more peripheral scholars are less likely to enjoy the scholarly and professional benefits of accurate metadata. Textual analysis of metadata can provide evidence to better inform normative and professional appraisals of journal quality, value and legitimacy.