Why Metadata Enrichment Matters for the Public Knowledge Project

Written By Clare Dean

By Juan Pablo Alperin, Public Knowledge Project and COMET Organizer. Cross-published from the Public Knowledge Project blog.

Metadescription: Continue on to learn why PKP is deeply involved in efforts, such as the Collaborative Metadata initiative (COMET), to improve the completeness and accuracy of metadata.  

At PKP, we believe that scholarly publishing should reflect the full diversity of global research and perspectives. Our software, including Open Journal Systems (OJS), supports thousands of journals around the world—many of them small, community-led, multilingual, and operating outside traditional commercial publishing models. These journals often fill critical gaps in regional and subject-specific knowledge, and yet, too often, their work remains invisible in global academic indexing systems.

Even as more inclusive databases begin to capture scholarly publishing’s hidden diversity, incomplete and incorrect metadata are preventing many works from being discovered. Problems such as missing affiliations, incomplete names, lack of identifiers, and unindexed references also make it impossible for works and authors to be counted for research assessment. 

To achieve the inclusive and equitable world of scholarly publishing that PKP aspires to, it is therefore not enough to support the open publishing of diverse scholarship. We must also find ways of ensuring that these works, published across so many countries, contexts, and languages, are able to be fully integrated into the global scholarly record. 

Quality metadata can make that happen, but no publisher can do it alone. 

Rich Metadata Needs Collaboration

There are many challenges to achieving high quality metadata, especially when that metadata is being produced by tens of thousands of individual publications, across cultures and languages, each of whom have unique editorial processes and, often, limited resources. It would be unreasonable—if not impossible—for editors and production teams to know how their metadata is going to appear in every database or service. 

This is why at PKP we have been studying how metadata issues can vary across cultures, how multilingualism affects metadata quality, and the metadata quality of promising sources like OpenAlex. It is also why we have taken a leading role in COMET: an initiative to collaboratively curate metadata. 

COMET is reimagining metadata as a shared community responsibility—where organizations like PKP, and the researchers who rely on our software, are empowered to help shape the scholarly record. Through COMET, PKP wants to help put in place processes, systems, and governance that can bring together a community—of scholars, librarians, infrastructure developers, university administrators, funders, and others—to develop a shared accountability for the integrity of scholarly communication.

A community-powered future

As we have written elsewhere, infrastructure is a shared responsibility. In making software for scholarly publishing widely available, we have contributed to the publishing of millions of scholarly records—many of which have incomplete or inaccurate metadata describing these records. While our software and documentation support each journal, press, and preprint server to publish the most complete and correct metadata possible, we believe that, by working together with the community, we can more effectively achieve the dream of universal indexing for all of our community. 

The COMET approach is promising because it does not propose to create a single centralized source of truth for all scholarly records. COMET proposes a model in which third parties can work together to enrich and validate metadata, who can then help bring those enrichments back to their source (be it the OJS installation or the DOI record). Importantly, this approach to collaborative curation, in keeping with PKP’s philosophy, respects local authority and editorial autonomy. 

Learn more and get involved

If this sounds too idealistic or complicated, rest assured it is not. More than 50 organizations have already participated in COMET’s Taskforce phase to feed input into this work. Now that the community input has transitioned the taskforce into an initiative, COMET is demonstrating how such a model could work through a series of pilot projects already underway. 

COMET’s next major event is the Community Kickoff Meeting on July 15, 2025, where early findings will be shared, and a roadmap for the next phase will be set.

Clare Dean
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California Digital Library’s COMET Organizational Perspective