Addressing the unharmonised metadata of RSS feeds would support research discovery and speed up science

RSS feeds allow academics and others to keep track of the latest papers to publish in a chosen selection of research journals. They are machine-readable and aggregable, thus presenting a potentially simple solution for promoting content awareness on a large scale. However, Andreas Pacher flags a handful of problems which continue to limit the effectiveness of RSS feeds; namely a lack of metadata, a lack of harmonised metadata, and a more general lack of awareness. If efforts are focused on addressing these problems, RSS potentially speeds up science by aiding research discovery for scholars and other publics, representing a positive contribution to scholarly communications as a whole.