Welcome to Platform Updates, the weekly podcast from research※mesh. Today is Monday, August 18th, 2025. In this episode, we will cover three updates to the platform.

First up are some changes to our indexing engine, the part of the system that catalogues new journal articles. This means newsletter administrators will soon receive a report on the contents of the next newsletter a few days before it is scheduled for delivery. This pre-publication report uses an enhanced layout, functioning more like a dashboard for monitoring newsletter content. It will also indicate when an article minimum has not been reached, giving administrators an option to send the newsletter anyway if consistent delivery is a priority. This new workflow will be rolled out to accounts over the next few weeks.

Our second update is the completion of our DataCite integration. This means a broader range of research outputs, such as datasets, can now be captured in the newsletter. The platform identifies these items only after a researcher adds them to their ORCID profile, using the DataCite connection to retrieve the necessary metadata. For your researchers to include this content, they will need to add any DataCite registered materials to the <em>Works</em> section of their ORCID profile.

And for our final item today, we're going under the hood to talk about something we call 'In Pursuit of the Missing Metadata.' This touches on a status some of you may have seen in your admin reports: 'still collecting metadata.' The single biggest technical aspect of creating this platform is corralling article metadata. The scientific publishing ecosystem is a combination of legacy systems and new platforms, with no single entity in charge. Different publishers follow different standards for the data they make available. For the platform to automatically generate content with accuracy, it requires dependable metadata as a ground truth. The AI part of the process is a thin layer built on a much larger stack of retrieval processes. So when you see a 'still collecting metadata' status, it means the system's underlying retrieval processes have not yet established enough information about an article to proceed. This can happen because of lags between when an article appears in one registry and when its data shows up in others, or it can be the result of publisher errors. The platform automates the job of going back to search for correct data over time. When you receive a missing metadata notice in your report, our team gets the same alert. These are the outlier articles we are focused on. While the majority of these issues resolve over time, we just wanted to highlight that when you see that notice, we are on the case.

And that brings us to the end of this week's updates. To recap, we covered the new pre-publication reports for newsletter administrators, the completion of our DataCite integration, and a look at what the 'still collecting metadata' status means.

That final point about metadata collection touches on all the items we discussed today. From the DataCite connection bringing in new types of information, to the pre-publication reports showing what the system has gathered, the function is about finding and organizing data from many sources. The 'missing metadata' notice is a window into that process.

Thank you for listening to Platform Updates.