NAIF: Responsible Research Assessment and Metadata Quality for Interoperable Research Infrastructures in Switzerland

This poster presents ongoing work within the NAIF project (National Approach for Interoperable Repositories and Findable Research Results), a swissuniversities-funded collaboration between eight Swiss higher-education institutions. NAIF addresses a key infrastructural challenge in contemporary research ecosystems: ensuring that repository metadata are sufficiently structured, interoperable, and trustworthy to support both the discovery of research outputs and the responsible use of quantitative indicators in research assessment.

Institutional repositories increasingly serve as central nodes within national and international research infrastructures. They provide access to publications, datasets, and other scholarly outputs while simultaneously feeding metadata into discovery services, open-science infrastructures, and research-information systems. At the same time, these metadata increasingly underpin monitoring and evaluation practices in universities and funding organisations. This dual role raises important questions: how can repository metadata be curated so that they remain interoperable and reusable across infrastructures, while also providing a reliable foundation for responsible and transparent research assessment?

The work presented here approaches this challenge from two complementary directions. The first concerns the responsible use of quantitative indicators in research evaluation. Building on workshops with stakeholders from Swiss higher-education institutions and the broader scientometrics community, the project investigates how principles associated with initiatives such as DORA and CoARA can be translated into operational practices within institutional infrastructures. Preliminary results highlight that indicators must be interpreted in context, that transparency about data sources and methods is essential, and that evaluation practices should prioritise aggregated monitoring over individual-level benchmarking whenever possible. Future work expands this effort through a qualitative survey of actors involved in research assessment and repository management. The survey aims to map institutional practices, expectations, and tensions surrounding the use of indicators, and to identify how repository infrastructures and metadata practices can better support responsible evaluation.

The second focus concerns the enrichment and standardisation of key categories of academic metadata that connect research outputs with the broader scholarly ecosystem. Particular attention is given to four interrelated data families: organisational identifiers that disambiguate institutions; persistent researcher identifiers; structured funding information linking outputs to funding programmes; and metadata describing open-access status and publication pathways. These elements form the contextual backbone that allows research outputs to be linked reliably to people, organisations, funding streams, and dissemination models across infrastructures.

Strengthening these metadata families improves the interoperability of institutional repositories and enables more reliable data exchange with national and international infrastructures. At the same time, improved metadata quality enhances the transparency and interpretability of research indicators derived from these systems.

By bringing together questions of metadata stewardship and responsible metrics, the poster argues that evaluation practices and repository infrastructures should not be treated as separate domains. Instead, they must be developed together as parts of a shared sociotechnical infrastructure that supports trustworthy knowledge production, equitable research evaluation, and the long-term visibility of scholarly outputs.

Presented as Contribution 166 / Poster-01:21 at the DARIAH Annual Event 2026, Rome, Italy, May 26–29, 2026.