Participant Perspectives | Hannah Hope from Wellcome
Hannah Hope, Wellcome
Please explain a little about your background and why you’re interested in persistent identifier (PID) metadata and its enrichment.
My career has centered around how scientific knowledge is produced, communicated and reused – I’ve worked as a publisher, science communicator and a research funder. Persistent identifier metadata is tool for knowledge transfer across an array of use cases. As a community we need to have access to accurate and detailed metadata to enable this and post-production enrichment is a vital feature that we’re currently missing.
What excites you most about the potential for collaborative enrichment of PID metadata (e.g. to improve research discoverability, impact tracking, better reflect the global nature of scholarly communications)? What do you think will be the most challenging aspect to address?
From my position within a funder, our interests are focused on improving research discoverability across a range of research outputs and enhance our ability to understand the reach and use of those outputs. We want to contribute the enrichments we have made within our systems with others in the community.
As a board member of the non-profit the OA Switchboard, we’re keenly aware of the challenges metadata quality is creating for users of our product. Collaborative enrichment offers the opportunity of a streamlined community approach to this rather than the inefficient proliferation of custom work arounds.
What successful examples of community collaboration in scholarly infrastructure have you witnessed that could inform the proposed COMET model’s development?
There are many that I don’t know about, so I’m reticent to name any. Instead I’ll ask a question back. Global inclusion can often be a secondary thought, how can COMET be developed to deliver a collaboration and enrichment services that support the global research community from the get go?
How could better and more complete PID metadata, derived from the proposed COMET model, help to advance your goals, those of your organization, or your communities?
The opportunities here are extensive but at the simplest level if we can collectively share the enhancements that we are ALL making behind closed doors then we can ALL increase our productivity and reduce our costs.
Whether you’re interested in demonstrating the impact of the research at the project/portfolio/organisation level; publishing research outputs, tracking compliance, conducting metascience research; identifying research misconduct; or synthesising evidence. More complete metadata can make our lives easier.
What benefits do you envision enriched PID metadata enrichments, such as is being aimed for through COMET, will have on the broader research ecosystem?
One of the benefits I haven’t yet mentioned is that it spreads the workload of high quality metadata production across the ecosystem. Currently the burden of metadata sits with the producers and “minters” of that information, whose systems and workflows may preclude what information can be collected. If COMET is successful in providing additional opportunities to input metadata then this work is shared and the barriers of specific workflows or systems reduced.
Why do you think organizations interested in PID metadata enrichment should consider contributing resources towards the first phase of development for the proposed COMET model?
As I’ve alluded to in my earlier responses COMET is an opportunity to increase the efficiency and quality of our existing workflows within the ecosystem. Whether your organizations is a research institution, university, funder, publisher, repository, PID provider, workflow provider, data aggregator or indexer then there are opportunities for you to gain from COMET. You are also likely to already have workflows and work arounds for managing metadata enrichments either manual or programmatic that could form contributions to the first development phase of the model.