Driving open research information forward: Why metadata enrichment matters for us at CWTS
By Nees Jan van Eck, CWTS - Center for Science and Technology Studies, Leiden University
The Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at Leiden University recently joined the COMET Organizer group. In this post, CWTS researcher Nees Jan van Eck explains why CWTS is passionate about enriching metadata and participating in COMET.
Please explain a little about why CWTS is interested in persistent identifier (PID) metadata and its enrichment.
At CWTS we are proud to be well-known for our expertise in the field of scientometrics, where we have done a lot of work over the past four decades. At the moment, we are in the middle of a transition to a new way of doing scientometrics, based as much as possible on data from open sources. This is part of a broader transition to openness of research information, a transition that is promoted by the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information, an initiative of which CWTS is one of the initiators.
We have learned that the open research information transition can be successful only if open research information infrastructures can be shown to outperform traditional proprietary data sources in terms of data quality. This requires the use of PIDs combined with clever strategies for enriching the associated metadata. Without effective metadata enrichment, the open research information transition is going to be very challenging.
How could better and more complete PID metadata help to advance the goals of CWTS? And how would the broader research ecosystem benefit from this?
At CWTS we have a strong interest in the use of open research information to advance responsible approaches to research assessment, to monitor the growing adoption of open science practices, and to support better decision making in the research system. For each of these use cases, having high-quality PID metadata is critical.
For instance, if we manage to improve the quality and completeness of affiliation metadata associated with DOIs, we will be able to identify in more accurate ways the research outputs produced by a university (e.g., in the CWTS Leiden Ranking), which will then enable us to provide more accurate research analytics to support decision making and research assessment processes at the university. Ultimately, this will help the university to be more successful in realizing its strategic goals.
In the context of monitoring of open science practices, the COMET approach may for instance enable the quality of links between preprints and the corresponding journal articles to be improved. This will then allow the adoption of preprinting to be tracked in more accurate ways. As a result, we expect organizations to be better positioned to take actions to strengthen preprint adoption.
What successful examples of community collaboration in scholarly infrastructure have you witnessed that could inform the proposed COMET Model’s development?
ORCID and ROR provide successful examples of community collaboration, demonstrating the value of distributed approaches to metadata collection and curation. Works-magnet, a tool developed by the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research, is another interesting example. It offers a community-based approach to the curation of affiliation metadata, focusing on open data sources, in particular OpenAlex. This is a powerful approach that is likely to be more effective than traditional curation approaches used by proprietary data sources, where curation takes place in siloed ways, limiting the benefits of curation efforts.
Why do you think organizations interested in PID metadata enrichment should consider contributing resources to co-develop the proposed COMET Model?
Based on our extensive experience at CWTS in enriching metadata, we are very much aware of the large amount of effort it takes to produce high-quality metadata. We therefore realize the huge importance of organizing metadata enrichment in efficient and collaborative ways. When different organizations each perform metadata enrichment on their own, this easily leads to wasteful duplication of effort. By working together in the spirit of the COMET philosophy, metadata enrichment can be performed more efficiently and more effectively. Ultimately we will all benefit from this. This is why we at CWTS are proud to participate in COMET.