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Launch of the second phase of the QUAMEO project

The goal of the QUAMEO (Quality of OpenEdition Metadata) project, which is led by OpenEdition in partnership with Abes (the French Bibliographic Agency for Higher Education) and won the FNSO’s (French National Fund for Open Science) third call for proposals, is to improve the quality of the metadata associated with the digital publications available on OpenEdition’s platforms. The project is now entering its second phase, which involves manually linking authors of new documents to IdRef authority records through a plugin built into the digital publishing software Lodel. The ultimate goal is to identify all of an author’s works that have been published across OpenEdition’s four platforms and make them available in a single catalogue.

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By flagging publications and making them more visible, QUAMEO contributes to the data FAIRification process already at the core of the I-FAIR IR project (a winner of the FNSO’s first call for proposals).

Launched in February 2024, the three-year QUAMEO project is built around two main objectives: to enrich the metadata sent to Crossref for DOI attribution, and to identify authors reliably and consistently.

Enriching the metadata sent to Crossref for DOI attribution

Goal: to provide enhanced metadata that is linked more effectively to other resources, given that Crossref is often used as a source for metadata. For example, HAL uses Crossref to automatically create metadata for a newly registered article.

Action taken

  • The existing code has been updated for registering DOIs with Crossref and the latest version of Crossref’s metadata schema (5.3.1) is now used.
  • Summary metadata and licenses have been added.

Future action

  • Add other metadata: ORCID identifiers, etc. (see Crossref’s quality indicator).
  • Establish relationships between documents (translations, datasets).

Reliable and consistent identification of authors

Goal: set up a general index of authors from the OpenEdition platforms based on the IdRef repository managed by Abes (the French Bibliographic Agency for Higher Education).

First phase

The first phase involved linking the authors of works already published on the Books and Journals platforms to IdRef identifiers. That was possible thanks to our partnership with Abes on this project. It enabled us to automatically and securely retrieve the alignments between authors from the Books and Journals platforms and identifiers in the IdRef repository. Other data that could enrich our author index was also collected via the IdRef authority records, such as identifiers linked to other repositories (ORCID, VIAF, BNF, ISNI).

Second phase

The second phase will focus on manually linking authors of new documents to IdRef authority records through a plugin1 built into the digital publishing software Lodel. The publishing teams from the Journals platform will be the first to use this plugin, which will then be added to the Calenda platform. The plugin will be installed on the Books and Hypotheses platforms later, following further development work on Lodel 2 and WordPress. As with the first phase, any other identifiers in the IdRef authority record will be retrieved. Authors that are not listed in IdRef will be added by a cataloguer qualified to create and update authority data in IdRef.

Why is author identification so important?

The ultimate goal is to identify all of an author’s works that have been published across OpenEdition’s four platforms and make them available in a single catalogue. The idea here is to boost the visibility of authors’ publications and enhance the user experience. It will also provide access to richer, more reliable and more interoperable data, especially through the links created with identifiers from other repositories, prompting users to discover other resources.

Works published on OpenEdition that have an author assigned with an IdRef will be referenced in IdRef authority records, thereby making them easier to share and cite. IdRef and ORCID identifiers will also be integrated into our OAI-PMH repository, which is harvested by the search engines Isidore and GoTriple, the OpenAIRE platform and library service providers such as Worldcat and Ebsco Discovery Service.

To date, 88,000 authors have been assigned an IdRef, which represents about 50% of all authors on OpenEdition Books and Journals platforms2.

  1. The IdRef plugin for Lodel 1 will be available under a GNU GPL V3 license, which guarantees users the freedom to run, study, share and modify the software. ↩︎
  2. This figure is based on the estimations provided for the call for proposals in 2023, i.e. 90,000 authors for OpenEdition Books and 85,000 authors for OpenEdition Journals. ↩︎

OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
OpenEdition team (February 14, 2025). Launch of the second phase of the QUAMEO project. Open Electronic Publishing. Retrieved November 7, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/13bl5


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