Building Community Infrastructure for Collaborative Metadata Enrichment

Keynote given at ETH Zürich, 10 September 2025

Swiss Year of Scientrometrics Lecture 6

Abstract: Decades of reliance on proprietary and exclusionary bibliographic databases has perpetuated inequities, misrepresenting global research activity and disproportionately privileged outputs from the Global North and select disciplines. Meanwhile, the greater availability of open data, lower computational costs, and advancements in machine learning has allowed new, more inclusive, databases come online. As these databases draw on more diverse sources, it is clear that there is an immediate need for expert users and creators of research information to evaluate, enhance, and curate these open data. Drawing on the experience of indexing thousands of journals using the Public Knowledge Project's Open Journal Systems, this talk will present the proposed approach of COMET—a new initiative that aims to develop an open infrastructure to coordinate and equip the scholarly community to collaboratively enrich scholarly metadata. With the right community governance, the COMET model aims to address the metadata challenges holding back the adoption of open research information. The results have the potential to enable a paradigm shift in research assessment and discovery, with significant implications for global science policy.