Building Community Infrastructure for Collaborative Metadata Enrichment

On 10 September 2025, the ETH Library invites you to the sixth SYoS Lecture at ETH Zurich. Juan Pablo Alperin will speak on open metadata and collaborative research infrastructures.

Prof. Juan Pablo Alperin

For decades, proprietary bibliographic databases have shaped academic visibility – often at the expense of certain regions and disciplines. This has led to a distorted view of global scholarly activity. Today, open data, lower computational costs, and AI progress make more inclusive research infrastructures possible. 

In his lecture “Building Community Infrastructure for Collaborative Metadata Enrichment”, Juan Pablo Alperin, Associate Professor at the Simon Fraser University, introduces COMET, an initiative to build open infrastructure that enables research communities to enrich scholarly metadata collaboratively. 
 
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, COMET aims to improve the quality, completeness, and usability of open metadata – laying the foundation for fairer research assessment and global visibility.

The lecture “Building Community Infrastructure for Collaborative Metadata Enrichment” by Juan Pablo Alperin will take place on 10 September 2025, from 17.00 to 18.30, at ETH Zurich, LEE E 101, Leonhardstrasse 21, 8092 Zürich. 

The lecture will be held in English.
All attendees are warmly invited to join us for an aperitif afterwards. 
Please register via . We look forward to seeing you there! 

SYoS blog 

You can find all lectures of the Swiss Year of Scientometrics accompanied by expert contributions on our blog yearofscientometrics.ethz.ch.   

This lecture is a continuation of the project SYOS, which was initiated by the ETH Library and co-funded by external page swissuniversities

Juan Pablo Alperin is Associate Professor at the School of Publishing at Simon Fraser University and the Scientific Director of the Public Knowledge Project. He is a founding member of the COMET initiative and a leading international voice in open scholarly communication. 

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