Call to Action from the Collaborative Metadata Enrichment Taskforce (COMET)
By Adam Buttrrick, John Chodacki, Juan Pablo Alperin, Maria Praetzellis and Clare Dean
Executive Summary
The research ecosystem relies on high-quality, complete, and interconnected persistent identifier (PID) metadata to support discovery, tracking, and reuse of research outputs. Despite these needs, achieving this level of quality and completeness in PID metadata remains a consistent challenge. Current workflows often result in metadata being lost in the exchange between systems, siloed within individual services, or failing to ever be captured from the outset. The Collaborative Metadata Enrichment Taskforce (COMET) was established in 2024 to explore new approaches for addressing these gaps, following initial community discussions at the FORCE11 conference in Los Angeles and the Paris Conference on Open Research Information.
Through extensive stakeholder consultation, COMET has identified the critical need for improving PID metadata through community-driven enrichment. Recognizing the large-scale curation and improvement of PID metadata that is already being performed in discovery systems, funding databases, institutional repositories, and through research initiatives, COMET proposes a new open infrastructure service that will unite and amplify these efforts. By enabling diverse stakeholders - from libraries and publishers to data services and research institutions - to surface, combine, and contribute validated improvements to PID metadata records, this infrastructure will transform isolated work into collective value, improving the quality and interconnectedness of the scholarly communications ecosystem.
In its work to date, COMET has made significant progress in creating a foundation for collaborative PID metadata enrichment. Deep and thorough engagement with over 50 participants and advisors from a global group of research organizations, government agencies, funders, and service providers has created an initial network of contributors eager to share its resources and expertise. These engagement activities have also clarified the use cases, product definitions, and technical requirements for a future infrastructure service, yielded valuable insights into its governance needs, and identified immediate and actionable pilot opportunities.
Request for Contributions
COMET now looks to transition this work into a development phase and seeks strategic partners who can provide financial support, technical expertise, and operational guidance to ensure the infrastrastructure's successful implementation and long-term sustainability. The initial scope of work includes establishing governance structures, building core technical infrastructure, and launching metadata enrichment pilots. Founding partners will also serve on the infrastructure's strategic advisory bodies, where they will help shape its long-term direction by contributing to policy development, sustainability planning, and ensuring the system remains aligned with the needs and use cases of a global community.
We invite organizations to express their interest in contributing:
Direct resources in support of the infrastructure's development, including:
Financial support through grants, donations, or loans
Dedicated commitment of in-kind staffing resources (technical or operational support)
Metadata enrichments and datasets for initial testing and validation
Strategic guidance and expertise through participation in advisory and governance structures
Organizations interested in contributing should review the documentation and outputs generated through COMET’s consultations (linked below) and respond to this Community Call to Action with:
The specific resources your organization is willing to provide
Your organization's relevant experience with and need for PID metadata enrichment
Desire to participate in governance structures
Your organization's preferred level of involvement
Additional feedback on the infrastructure's development is also welcome. For full details on the COMET work to date, please review our resource documents.
How to Respond
Please send your responses outlining how you propose to contribute to COMET through this form by May 1st, 2025. Responses will be reviewed by a group of conveners from the Collaborative Metadata Enrichment Taskforce (COMET) including John Chodacki, Adam Buttrick and Maria Praetzellis from California Digital Library, and Juan Pablo Alperin from Simon Fraser University.