When the California Digital Library (CDL) signed the Barcelona Declaration in April 2025, it marked a deeper institutional commitment to building open and community-led research infrastructure. At the heart of this commitment is a recognition that metadata is not a passive byproduct of scholarship, but an active force that shapes how research is discovered, connected, cited, and reused. To build an ecosystem where metadata reflects the values of openness, equity, and trust, we must ensure that its stewardship is shared, inclusive, and sustainable.
This is why CDL’s University of California Curation Center (UC3) program is investing in COMET (Collaborative Metadata Enrichment Taskforce). COMET is both a vision and a framework for creating a healthier metadata ecosystem, where persistent identifiers are enriched and maintained through transparent, distributed workflows that engage the full research community. The principles below represent the building blocks of the COMET model and the foundation of CDL’s participation therein:
- Metadata Must Be Open and Reliable: As with our many efforts to make metadata freely accessible and machine-readable, COMET centers its work on improving completeness, consistency, and interoperability across the persistent identifier (PID) ecosystem. By supporting basic PID metadata elements (e.g., title, author affiliations, publication dates) to be made openly available, CDL aims to dismantle paywalled research environments, ensuring that even the most basic scholarly facts are free, reusable, and trustworthy
- Shared Stewardship Reduces Silos and Gaps: CDL understands the burden metadata creators face: original depositors often lack the resources to enrich records. Yet researchers, funders, and institutions have knowledge that could fill those gaps. COMET’s community-curation model is modeled after the success of ROR, which distributes responsibility for metadata improvements across the ecosystem
CDL’s engagement with COMET reflects its “pathways” approach: working within existing metadata systems while facilitating new, collaborative routes for enrichment and shared stewardship across the ecosystem. - Community Governance Builds Trust and Quality: COMET is not proprietary. It prioritizes inclusive, transparent governance—publishing standards, embracing equitable practices, and grounding changes in real-world use cases. CDL’s track record with community-governed PID systems (Crossref, DataCite, ROR) aligns perfectly with COMET’s ethos.
- Actionable Tools Empower Diverse Contributors: CDL values infrastructure that includes everyone: from a librarian correcting affiliation errors to a funder updating grant metadata. COMET is developing operational frameworks that allow stakeholders to contribute meaningfully, reducing editorial burden and enhancing metadata trust through visible provenance.
How COMET Emerged and CDL’s Participation
COMET emerged from a shared realization across the scholarly infrastructure community: if we want metadata that is trustworthy, complete, and actionable, we need to design systems that allow more people to contribute to it and more institutions to shape its governance. This vision came into sharper focus during a series of workshops at FORCE2024 held in Los Angeles and the Barcelona Declaration Community Meeting held in Paris, where participants from across disciplines and sectors gathered to discuss new models for collaborative metadata curation. These sessions surfaced a common theme: metadata enrichment can’t be sustained by individual repositories or publishers alone. What’s needed is a coordinated, community-powered model that invites researchers, libraries, funders, and infrastructure providers to play an active role in improving the quality of metadata tied to persistent identifiers.
Out of these conversations, COMET was born. By early 2025, COMET had evolved into a formal FORCE11 Project and culminated in an open “Community Call to Action” that invited broad participation in shaping workflows, tools, and governance models for metadata enrichment.
CDL was an early and enthusiastic supporter because the vision aligned with our mission and we see an opportunity to help bring it to life. Our involvement isn’t passive. CDL’s UC3 program brings more than two decades of experience in digital curation, persistent identifier infrastructure, and open scholarly systems. We contribute governance know-how, technical insight from our work on initiatives like EZID, Crossref, ROR, and DataCite, and convening power across academic and infrastructure communities. We also see COMET as a proving ground: a space to pilot scalable, community-led metadata workflows that can extend across institutions, repositories, and disciplines.
For CDL, joining COMET is a continuation of our long-standing commitment to open, shared infrastructure and collective progress. It’s an investment in a future where metadata is openly enriched, transparently verified, and valued by the very communities who depend on it.
What Community Participation Means
When libraries and institutions like CDL engage with efforts like COMET, the benefits extend far beyond improved metadata. Our participation brings a deep commitment to equity, transparency, and public stewardship with values that help shape infrastructure for the public good. By contributing expertise in curation, governance, and metadata standards, libraries ensure that research information is more complete, discoverable, and reusable across repositories, researcher profiles, and campus systems.
Shared governance is a central feature of COMET’s approach, and institutional involvement helps ensure that decisions reflect the needs of a global, diverse, distributed community. When we engage in this work, they align their local priorities with broader efforts to create trustworthy, persistent, and openly governed metadata. This alignment reduces redundancy, increases impact, and builds capacity for meaningful contributions across the ecosystem.
But the benefits of this work aren’t just at the institutional level. For researchers and end users, the results are tangible: better discovery, clearer provenance, and richer metadata that supports citation, reuse, and reproducibility. And for funders, repositories, and service providers, this community-driven model offers a scalable alternative to siloed or proprietary solutions that emphasize interoperability, transparency, and accountability.
That’s why we believe that COMET offers more than just a framework for metadata enrichment. It provides an opportunity for us to embody our mission-driven values and help build the connective infrastructure that research depends on. For CDL, supporting COMET is a way to double down on its long-standing commitment to open, community-led infrastructure. It’s about creating shared pathways to trust, equity, and impact where metadata isn’t hidden or locked down, but serves as the connective tissue for discovery and collaboration.
