To improve the quality, consistency and usefulness of research metadata, the scholarly communications community must adopt shared models of responsibility and stewardship. John Chodacki, Adam Buttrick, Juan Pablo Alperin, Clare Dean and Dione Mentis explain how community-led approaches like COMET are helping to build the infrastructure needed for a more connected and participatory research ecosystem.
Infrastructure is not just code or standards. It reflects how we organise trust, authority and participation. In scholarly communication, infrastructure shapes what gets seen, who gets recognised and how research is understood and used. These decisions, often invisible, carry real consequences for equity, access and accountability.
Efforts like Public Knowledge Project (PKP) and the Research Organisation Registry (ROR) have shown what’s possible when infrastructure reflects community values. PKP helped shift scholarly publishing by developing a self-hosted open source publishing platform with input and contributions from the community, while ROR has created a trusted, globally adopted registry for institutions through transparent, community-led development. These initiatives demonstrate that collective action does not mean disorder. Instead, it can lead to more robust, inclusive and resilient systems.
Metadata is essential, but often incomplete
Persistent identifiers such as DOIs, ORCiDs and RORs are now a core part of the scholarly infrastructure. They have become essential to tracking, connecting and evaluating research. However, their utility depends on the quality and completeness of the metadata associated with them. Ideally, the underlying metadata allows for discovery, attribution, analysis and reuse. In practice, this vision is unevenly realised.
In the current persistent identifier ecosystem, the responsibility for metadata creation and correction lies with the original depositor. Whether a journal, a publisher, or a repository, these entities are treated as the sole authoritative source, even if their metadata records are incomplete or inconsistent. Meanwhile, other metadata users, such as researchers, institutions, funders and aggregators, often hold information that could improve these records but have no systematic means to contribute it.
The result is a fragmented and inefficient system, where corrections and enrichments are rarely shared or reconciled. Recognising these long-standing challenges, the Collaborative Metadata Enrichment Taskforce (COMET) has brought together stakeholders to chart a more collaborative path forward.
The proposed COMET model, as shown in the figure above, draws from existing practices, community needs and lessons from past initiatives to support a collective approach to improving our shared metadata infrastructure. It is not a replacement for current systems, but an infrastructure that allows us to align efforts, make contributions visible and shift enrichment from isolated interventions to a shared responsibility.
Authority and quality are not the same
For collective action around persistent identifier metadata to succeed, the community must recognise a fundamental distinction: source authority is not the same as metadata quality. A record may come from an official or authoritative source, but that does not guarantee it is complete, current or useful to others across the ecosystem. Too much responsibility is placed on those creating metadata, even though identifying or correcting issues may be more easily done by others in the community.
Recognising that authority and quality are distinct is the first step toward creating the trust structures needed for collaboration.
This is not a failure of any one persistent identifier provider or stakeholder group, but instead a reflection of how scholarly infrastructure has evolved without mechanisms for shared stewardship. If we want to coordinate enrichment efforts and improve metadata quality at scale, we need to support multiple sources of contribution, allow for transparent validation and enable reconciliation across systems. Recognising that authority and quality are distinct is the first step toward creating the trust structures needed for collaboration.
Collective infrastructure, shared responsibility
The value of collective action is well understood in publishing, where platforms like Open Journal Systems (OJS) enable local control while supporting global interoperability. Similarly, decentralising metadata stewardship can enable institutions, services and individuals to contribute improvements to metadata records in structured ways that can be shared across systems. When multiple people independently submit the same corrections or additions, that agreement functions as validation. When disagreements arise, shared benchmarks and records of who made each suggestion help resolve the conflict.
In traditional workflows, trust is often inferred from who registered the metadata record. The COMET model shifts the conversation by rooting trust in process and transparency. By foregrounding provenance and shared evaluative frameworks, the COMET model enables users to build trust through evidence, not assumption. It offers a durable and scalable foundation for metadata quality.
This approach builds on a broader tradition of community infrastructure in scholarly communication. Projects like PKP and ROR demonstrated how community-led governance and open tooling can expand participation. We now need to apply these same principles to the curation and improvement of metadata, showing how distributed contributions can strengthen and not fragment the ecosystem.
Lessons from publishing
The PKP story offers an important reminder that infrastructure change is not just about solving technical problems. PKP’s specific approach to open source, with an emphasis on collaboration and on building local capacities, was instrumental in empowering communities to take ownership of their publishing infrastructure. That is, the widespread adoption of OJS was driven as much by shared values and community participation as by software features.
The COMET model follows a similar path. It brings together stakeholders from across the research ecosystem, including publishers, repositories, institutions, infrastructure providers and funders to define collective goals and coordinate distributed actions. This participatory approach ensures that the infrastructure reflects community needs and remains adaptable as those needs evolve. The goal is not to centralise control, but to coordinate collaboration.
Lessons from infrastructure
The development of ROR offers another important example of how community-led infrastructure can address long-standing gaps in scholarly metadata. Like PKP, ROR’s success has been grounded not just in solving the technical need for an openly available identifier system for research institutions, but in how that system was built and governed.
From the start, ROR has been shaped by the needs of the community it serves. Decisions about records in ROR are transparent, standards are published and changes are driven by use cases from across the research ecosystem. ROR’s technical infrastructure is lightweight, but its impact is profound – it has become a trusted metadata layer that underpins affiliation data in persistent identifier systems, research funder platforms and publication workflows.
Openness, accountability and shared maintenance can turn an institutional name into a durable public good.
Like the COMET model, ROR doesn’t seek to duplicate existing infrastructure. It strengthens it by making connections more reliable, visible and reusable. It also shows how openness, accountability and shared maintenance can turn an institutional name into a durable public good.
A shared future for metadata
By aligning enrichment practices, enabling shared contributions and embedding community governance, we can build infrastructure that is more responsive, resilient and representative of the research it describes. If PKP demonstrated the power of community publishing, the COMET taskforce is helping us see the value of community curation. The next chapter of scholarly communication will be written not by any one organisation, but by the collective action of many.
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