On 10th of September 2025, the sixth lecture of the Swiss Year of Scientometrics (SYoS) took place at ETH Zurich. Professor Juan Pablo Alperin attracted an interested audience of more than 50 participants with an inspiring talk on “Building Community Infrastructure for Collaborative Metadata Enrichment”. The presentation slides and a recording of his lecture are now available.
Dr David Johann (ETH Library) opened the event and expressed his delight to welcome Prof. Alperin and the large audience with many familiar faces from the Swiss community interested in scientometrics. Next, co-organiser of the first Swiss Open Academic Data (SOAD) day, Gaël Bernard (EPFL) provided a recap of SOAD, which was held earlier on that day. Bernard also announced that a second SOAD event was planned for 2026.
Rethinking Research Assessment: A New Era of Open Infrastructures
In his thought-provoking lecture, Prof Alperin took the audience on a historic journey through the evolution of the representation of scholarly works: from the early days of the Science Citation Index printed on paper, to the rise of bibliographic databases, and now into a new era shaped by open data and open infrastructures.
Alperin highlighted how traditional providers, such as Web of Science, were excellent at capturing publications from major publishing houses, however, fell short in representing the full spectrum of global research. For instance, he pointed out that especially non-English-speaking regions were left behind, a limitation that underlines the need for more inclusive and open systems.
Journals using the Public Knowledge Project’s Open Journal Systems (OJS), for example, are under-represented. By the end of 2024, OJS was used to publish more than 47,000 active journals, the vast majority of which are not indexed in traditional databases. To show the relevance of this issue, Alperin showed a chart based on OpenAlex data that showed that around 900 articles were published in journals using OJS by scholars from ETH Zurich since 2010.
A Paradigm Shift from Closed to Open Infrastructures
Alperin described a fundamental shift in how research was assessed and understood, i.e., assessment was moving away from closed, proprietary infrastructures to open, community-driven ones. He referred to this transformation as a “game changer” for academia, providing examples, such as the open data version of the Leiden Ranking, and policy changes from international institutions, such as Sorbonne University.
One key milestone in this movement was the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information, advocating for transparency, accessibility, and collective stewardship of scholarly data.
OpenAlex and the Future of Metadata
While Alperin expressed concerns about the possible disappearance of platforms we have grown to rely on for research discovery, such as Google Scholar, he remained optimistic about OpenAlex. OpenAlex is an open database, based on open data, with the potential to replace commercial providers. Even if the platform were to cease operations, its data would remain available thanks to the resilience of open systems.
However, OpenAlex is not without its limitations: Metadata on the platform has some inconsistencies. Unlike commercial databases, the open nature of OpenAlex allows the community to scrutinize and help improve it for the benefit of all. Alperin is involved in one such initiative: the Collaborative Metadata Enrichment Taskforce (COMET).
Introducing COMET: A Community-Based Approach and A Call to Action
COMET is a model designed to decentralise and democratise metadata enrichment. Rather than relying on isolated silos – be they small or large – COMET encourages feeding improvements back to the original data sources. Thanks to Persistent Identifiers (PIDs), collaborative efforts to create a more accurate representation of research have become far more feasible. The model was built on three core principles: 1) collective stewardship, 2) collective benefit, and 3) trust through transparency and collective governance. COMET views itself as a collective facilitator. Seven pilot projects are already underway to test and refine the model.
Alperin concluded with a call to action: Science should invest in open infrastructures. The tools and data already exist, and it is time to bring them together now. By embracing distributed solutions and working collaboratively, the community could build a more accurate, inclusive, and transparent representation of global research.
Questions, Answers, and Outlooks
Johann moderated an inspiring Q&A session. The discussion zoomed in on the trustworthiness of the curation of open metadata and possible burdens for the community in relation to community-curated metadata. For example, how could curated data be fed back to the original sources? How did the “fields as features” concept be embedded? And, what are the reasons why institutions still invested in commercial tools. The lively exchange continued over an Apéro.
The video recording of the lecture is available:
00:00:04 Introduction by Dr David Johann
00:01:16 Gaël Bernard, EPFL, recaps SOAD Day
00:02:27 David Johann introducing Professor Juan Pablo Alperin
00:03:27 Start of the lecture by Professor Juan Pablo Alperin
00:10:58 Example OJS Open Journal Systems
00:13:09 Paradigm shift – moving from closed to open infrastructure
00:21:34 OpenAlex and Dimension have more content, but is metadata up to the task?
00:30:38 COMET Collaborative Metadata
00:45:03 Conclusion – the perfect is the enemy of the good
00:49:33 David Johann opens the Q&A session
01:24:05 Outlook by David Johann
01:25:59 End of the event
The slides are also available for download.
The author acknowledges helpful comments on the blog post by Dr Kathrin Thomas (University of Aberdeen) and Dr Juan Pablo Alperin (Simon Fraser University).
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