Collaborative metadata enrichment
Metadata quality: why collaboration matters
Knowledge creation relies on a collaborative, always evolving, research ecosystem. In this ecosystem ideas are spread through reliable persistent identifiers (PIDs) that connect research to researchers, institutions, funders, communities, and society at large. When metadata is incomplete or inaccurate, the consequences reverberate across the entire ecosystem:
- researchers can’t find relevant work,
- institutions struggle to demonstrate impact,
- funders lose visibility over their investments,
- underrepresented communities face barriers to recognition,
- and society is denied valuable knowledge that could shape our future.
The fundamental problem is structural. Today’s PID ecosystem relies on a single-source ownership model, where original depositors bear sole responsibility for their metadata records. This model preserves source authority—a legitimate and necessary prioirty—but conflates it with quality. The broader community has the knowledge and capacity to fill gaps and correct errors, yet lacks a structured mechanism to do so. COMET exists to change that.
The time is now
The growth of inclusive scholarly databases like OpenAlex, enabled by underlying PID infrastructure, has galvanized the community around a vision of equitable, open, and community-governed research discovery and assessment. Initiatives like the Barcelona Declaration and the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) are building consensus around this vision, but it must be operationalised urgently.
These movements will not achieve their full impact if metadata in open infrastructures remains incomplete, inconsistent, and structurally biased—particularly toward research from underrepresented regions, languages, and disciplines long marginalised by the systems they seek to reform. COMET offers a concrete, proven path from advocacy to lasting impact, coordinating enrichment work targeting these gaps, integrating with existing infrastructures, correcting imbalances, and building trusted methods that work across linguistic and regional contexts.
Fostering a community of practice
COMET’s Model is designed to build community capacity for this work, not dependency on a single project or service. By establishing shared methods, evaluation standards, and integration pathways, the model reduces the burden on individual organisations and embeds enrichment as an ongoing practice in existing infrastructures.
Without coordination and shared standards, community enrichment initiatives will remain fragmented and time-limited, reinforcing existing structural inequities. COMET addresses this gap with a proven, scalable model.
COMET’s story so far
Conference beginnings
Seeding early momentum
COMET emerged from the recognition that the community-driven enrichment model proven by the Research Organization Registry (ROR) could be extended to address broader, systemic gaps in open research metadata. Building on ROR’s development history, early consultations at the FORCE11 Conference (June 2024) and the Paris Conference on Open Research Information (September 2024) brought together community stakeholders to identify the challenges and opportunities associated with PID metadata enrichment. These sessions revealed broad agreement that this work must become a shared, community-wide responsibility, rather than siloed within individual platforms or borne solely by its original creators.
Task force consultation
Designing community-driven enrichment
In response, a FORCE11 task force was established through an open call for participation, drawing members from major university and research systems, publishers, government agencies, and infrastructure providers. Across a series of focused sessions, the task force worked to define the product, technical, and governance requirements for implementing a more expansive, community-driven enrichment model within existing infrastructures. Building on the requirements defined in this task force phase, an open call was issued for organizations to contribute to building and testing a community-driven enrichment model.
Testing approaches
Validating through pilot projects
The California Digital Library (CDL), DataCite, Public Knowledge Project (PKP), and the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at Leiden University joined forces to organise and resource COMET’s initial development, proving its model through a series of targeted pilot projects in collaboration with community partners. The results of this work validated COMET’s core premise: when enrichment work is coordinated around shared methods, evaluation frameworks, and integration with infrastructures, it can produce trusted, reusable outputs that strengthen the scholarly record.
Current work
Building foundations for scale
With pilot projects already demonstrating impact, the focus shifts to solidifying the COMET Model’s coordinating role by enabling community-driven metadata enrichment and putting shared evaluation frameworks into practice, ensuring that enrichments are trustworthy and reliably integrated by authoritative sources and downstream platforms.