People-Powered Metadata: Building a Community of Curators with OpenOrgs

Organisational identity is essential for making research outputs easier to find, cite, and reuse. However, inconsistent metadata continues to be a problem across scholarly communication systems. Without reliable metadata about research organisations, outputs risk being misattributed, overlooked, or undervalued. OpenOrgs, a service in the OpenAIRE ecosystem, addresses this issue by disambiguating, structuring, and improving metadata about research organisations. While automation can scale detection, only a community of expert curators can ensure metadata truly reflects the complex and evolving research landscape.

At the heart of OpenOrgs is a growing community of curators - over one hundred experts from 60 countries - from national experts to the central Curation Board. To date, they have edited and approved more than 102.000 institutional records. Together, they maintain and improve the quality of organisational metadata. Curators work includes resolving conflicts, merging duplicate records, enriching metadata, and setting up parent–child hierarchies that reflect institutional structures. This guarantees that records are maintained accurately, remain up-to-date, and meaningful within the wider research system.