In the current PID ecosystem, the responsibility for metadata creation and correction lies with the original depositor. These entities are treated as the sole authoritative source, even if their metadata records are incomplete or inconsistent and they do not have the capacity or resources to improve them. Meanwhile, other metadata users, such as researchers, institutions, funders, and aggregators, often hold information that could improve these records but have no systematic means to contribute it. Corrections and enrichments are rarely shared or reconciled. Recognizing these long-standing challenges, and lost opportunities for improvement, the Collaborative Metadata Enrichment Taskforce (COMET) has brought together stakeholders to build a collaborative path forward.
The COMET model is focused on extending the successful community curation and enrichment approach pioneered by ROR to the domain of DOI metadata. ROR showed how community-led infrastructure can address long-standing gaps in scholarly metadata; its success grounded not only in solving the technical need for an openly available identifier system for research institutions, but in how that system was built and governed. Like ROR, COMET strives to be shaped by the needs of the community it serves, with transparent decision-making, published standards, and changes driven by use cases from across the research ecosystem. The model is not a replacement for current systems, but a complementary infrastructure that allows us to align efforts, make contributions visible, and enrichments a shared responsibility.
COMET is designed to actively enhance the completeness, consistency, and interoperability of metadata across the PID ecosystem through proven models for community curation and enrichment. COMET is built through collaboration, and is designed to be sustained through community curation, adding to existing efforts to democratize PID infrastructure
Like so many transformations in research infrastructure, COMET emerged from community discussion. At the FORCE2024 Conference in Los Angeles and the Paris Conference on Open Research Information, we held community workshops about the need for collaborative approaches to improving metadata quality. At both events, we discussed metadata collaboration, exploring how to collectively enrich, verify, and maintain the accuracy and trustworthiness of research metadata. These discussions focused our shared commitment to transforming how we all handle metadata across the scholarly community.
The Collaborative Metadata Enrichment Taskforce (COMET) was created in October 2024, inviting open participation from the community to join the taskforce and discuss several key areas for consideration in the formation of a new model for community curated metadata enrichment. In early 2025, it became an official FORCE11 Project. Through its focused discussions, COMET surfaced key considerations for metadata enrichment as it progresses forward into its pilot phases, while underscoring the value of community curation.
In February 2025, COMET issued a Community Call to Action, calling on individuals and organizations to express interest in contributing to COMET by providing metadata enrichments, resourcing and expertise, or suggesting pilot projects.
From the many responses we received, COMET identified key partners, project collaborators, and advisors to move into COMET’s new phase of active development.
We’re in awe of how far the COMET community has come in a short period of time to collectively reimagine a future for enriched PID metadata, and are energized by the enthusiasm for the COMET model and infrastructure development.