I've been keeping tabs on @Metadata2020, a cross-sector standards-setting & best-practices initiative. Important work. That said, I'm fascinated by the rhetoric employed to explain it. +
We've never had (or will have) complete, open, interoperable metadata. Research is not being stymied. More widely shared metadata standards & practices, by whatever degree, will help *enable* research. To say it is being stymied is to assume the world of the regulative ideal. +
This same rhetorical move is used in arguments for open access as well. It's a nifty way of shifting focus from who/what enables or underlies the circulation of data & documents to who/what is blocking their seemingly natural condition of unhindered flow. +
@alexcsiszar uses the phrase "access fantasies": "claims about the way in which access to science...ought to be facilitated and secured." (press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book…). The rhetoric that posits unhindered flow is not making a claim: it's articulating a vision of a lost utopian world.
