The Collaborative Metadata Enrichment Taskforce (COMET) has released a Community Call to Action, inviting organizations and individuals to contribute resources (funding, expertise, metadata, and infrastructure) to support the first phase of a community-driven infrastructure for making persistent identifier (PID) metadata better and more complete.
A Collaborative Approach to Metadata Enrichment
COMET was formed in October 2024 in response to discussions at the FORCE2024 Conference in Los Angeles and the Paris Conference on Open Research Information. In this context, stakeholders from across the research ecosystem identified a critical need for collaborative, community-led approaches that improve metadata quality and completeness. After summarizing these discussions on the Upstream blog - High-Quality Metadata: A Collective Responsibility and Opportunity and Advancing Metadata Quality: An Open Call to Collaborate - their conveners moved them into a more formal phase through a call for wider participation in the taskforce. A diverse array of participants from across the research community responded to this call, organizing themselves around the goal of articulating a clear vision for how to make collaborative enrichment of PID metadata a reality.
To date, this group has:
- Launched as a FORCE11 Working Group, bringing together over 50 stakeholders from across research institutions, government organizations, publishers, funders, and infrastructure providers
- Published a shared vision for its collaborative metadata enrichment framework.
- Held community listening sessions to gather insights on the use cases, product definitions, technical requirements, governance needs that would allow its vision to be implemented.
How You Can Contribute
Having laid this foundation, we now are calling on organizations, funders, and individuals to join COMET’s next phase, helping us to build this infrastructure by providing one or more of the following:
In-Kind Contributions
Your organization can commit personnel—either part-time or project-based—who bring:
- Technical expertise
- Knowledge of metadata enrichment workflows
- Governance and policy leadership (to help shape the long-term structure of COMET)
Many organizations already enhance metadata using sophisticated technical and curation workflows. By contributing this expertise to COMET, your team can help eliminate redundant efforts across the community.
Financial Support
To ensure COMET’s long-term sustainability, we are seeking financial commitments to:
- Develop core technical infrastructure.
- Support the initial implementation and testing of metadata curation models.
- Establish and support governance structures.
Funding partners will play an important role in shaping the future of metadata enrichment, ensuring that the infrastructure is equitable, open, and sustainable.
Enriched Metadata and Pilot Partnerships
Organizations that currently engage in metadata enrichment work can provide data and participate in pilot projects to help build COMET’s enrichment infrastructure. These contributions could include:
- Sharing enriched metadata from existing curation and enrichment workflows
- Participating in pilot projects to evaluate COMET's technical infrastructure and enrichment processes
- Collaborating on development of metadata quality assessment metrics
Why Now?
With mounting requirements for open access tracking, compliance monitoring, and impact assessment, organizations find themselves overwhelmed when working in isolation. COMET offers a path forward — a shared framework for metadata improvement that centers this work as a collective responsibility, rather than a burden for individual organizations. By joining our efforts, we ensure that PID metadata reflects the community's collective investment and delivers benefits to all.
Join Us – Respond to the Call to Action
If your organization is interested in contributing funds, personnel, metadata, or infrastructure, we invite you to join this initiative. Here’s how to respond:
- Specify the resources your organization is willing to provide (staffing, funding, metadata, infrastructure)
- Describe your organization’s relevant experience with metadata enrichment
- Indicate whether you’d like to participate in governance structures
- Submit your response via the COMET website by May 1, 2025
Contact us: info@cometadata.org
Learn more & submit your response: COMET Blog
Informational Webinar: March 5, 2025 at 3pm UTC. Recording Available
Copyright © 2025 Adam Buttrick. Distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
