Community-Based Approaches to Enriching PID Metadata at Scale: The DataCite and COMET Collaboration

Whether you produce, maintain, analyze, or integrate DataCite DOI metadata, you have probably experienced challenges with keeping it up to date, navigating gaps and inconsistencies in metadata properties and practices, or curating metadata for specific applications. While DataCite DOIs enable connectivity and interoperability, enhancing data quality and efficiencies across systems and workflows, the metadata associated with them still requires ongoing maintenance that can only be performed by original creators or in isolated applications. What if it were possible to shift our approach to metadata improvements? What if we can generate community-produced metadata improvements and incorporate them back into PID infrastructure in a way that is trusted, transparent, scalable, and genuinely useful downstream? A collaboration between DataCite and COMET is advancing innovative technical and community-based approaches to improving PID metadata at scale, currently focused on DataCite DOIs but broadly applicable across the ecosystem, to address systemic challenges and barriers in maintaining and updating metadata, and so that efforts to curate and improve metadata can make it back into the PID records the whole community depends on. COMET coordinates community-driven metadata enrichment—developing shared methods, open benchmarks, and validated datasets that address high-priority gaps in PID metadata. DataCite is building an enrichment layer that allows these improvements to be surfaced alongside original records, with full provenance, through the same APIs and data files that downstream systems already use.If you’ve ever wished for a better way to improve DataCite metadata or PID metadata in general, this session will present a concrete path forward, showing examples of metadata enrichment processes and tools developed through the collaboration that demonstrate how to bridge enrichment work done in isolation with infrastructure that serves everyone, guided by community values and input. In this session you will get a concrete look at how community-produced metadata enrichments can flow back into authoritative PID infrastructure as transparent, provenanced assertions, without displacing original records. You will see real enrichment outputs from COMET's work and follow their journey through benchmark validation to infrastructure integration. You will get an inside look at how the DataCite enrichment layer works in practice, and have the chance to explore and give feedback on DataCite’s enrichments API. We will also discuss how provenance works in practice. Every enrichment record carries information about who produced it, by what method, and how it was evaluated. You will see what this looks like in the DataCite enrichment layer and why it matters for the systems and organizations that consume it.After this session you will understand how an enrichment roundtrip can work end-to-end; how provenance information can accompany enriched metadata records and why this matters for downstream trust; and how your organization can engage with this work. This session is relevant to anyone who produces, curates, or consumes PID metadata, particularly but not limited to DataCite—including repositories, publishers, research information managers, aggregators, and infrastructure providers. No prior knowledge of COMET or DataCite's enrichment layer is required.