Prioritising actions for better academic metadata
Workshop participants used the ACM method to prioritise actions for metadata improvement.
Dr Moritz Mähr 
From ideas to action
On 15 October 2025, the first NAIF Track 4 workshop brought together repository managers, data stewards, and open science specialists from across Switzerland to explore four families of academic metadata: organisational data, authorship and researcher data, funding information, and open access and licensing data.
During the workshop, participants produced an extensive set of exploratory maps and proposed actions, which have been compiled on the NAIF Track 4 Trello board by Jorge Rodrigues de Matos (EPFL).
What was still missing was a shared sense of priority: which proposed actions are ready to be implemented, and which require additional groundwork?
To address this question, a second workshop took place on 8 December 2025 as a 90-minute online session. Twenty-one participants from fifteen institutions — including ETH Zurich, EPFL, University of Zurich, ZHAW, University of Fribourg, University of Neuchâtel, University of St. Gallen, Lib4RI, Berner Fachhochschule, Pädagogische Hochschule St. Gallen, and SLSP — met to classify and refine the proposed actions.
The method: agreement and certainty matrix
The Agreement & Certainty Matrix (ACM) was used to move beyond simple voting. The ACM asks two questions about each proposed action: how much do stakeholders agree on the problem and the direction of the solution, and how predictable is it that a chosen intervention will succeed in our context? Crossing these two dimensions produces four domains — Simple, Complicated, Complex, and Chaos — each suggesting a different style of action.
Participants first reviewed the 16 action cards on the Trello board individually, then rated up to five actions using emoji on a shared Miro board: 🤝 or 👎 for agreement, 💯 or 🤷♀️ for certainty. The resulting placement provided a visual landscape of the participants’ assessment.
What we found
Several actions landed firmly in the Simple quadrant — high agreement, high certainty — signalling that they are ready for direct implementation or straightforward process changes. These include action A1 (ORCID promotion at institutional level), A2 (DSpace–ORCID alignment), F1 (standard metadata for funding information), OA3 (enhancing repository metadata for the Swiss Open Access Repository Monitor), O1 (establishing an open working group on organisational data), and O7 (defining a framework to describe organisational hierarchies).
A cluster of actions fell into the Complicated zone, where certainty decreases but agreement remains strong: O2 (Swiss HEIs ROR Alignment & Curation Pilot), O3 (a lightweight shared registry linking local structures to global identifiers such as ROR, OpenOrgs, and Wikidata), and O6 (curating Wikidata entries for all Swiss HEIs). These require expert analysis and structured process change, but the direction is clear.
The Complex quadrant — lower agreement, lower certainty — captured the more ambitious proposals: OA1 (alignment with GOAL / opengoal.ch), OA2 (alignment with the new “OA Cost Monitoring” project led by ZHAW), A3 (making relevant systems ORCID-ready), F2 (awareness and incentives for providing funding information), O4 (publishing curated organisational data in machine-readable formats via the OpenAIRE Graph), O5 (a collaborative stewardship mechanism for data quality), and O8 (an interface guiding researchers to use correct institutional names with automatic ROR ID attachment). For these, the ACM recommends convening stakeholders and examining patterns before committing to large-scale implementation.
No actions were placed in the Chaos domain, which is an encouraging sign of the community’s shared understanding of the problem space.
Breakout discussions
After a short break, participants split into breakout groups organised by data family. Each group validated the ACM placement of its actions before selecting one action for further discussion, identifying potential owners and a provisional timeline. Where possible, results were documented as comments on the corresponding Trello cards. During the plenary discussion, each group presented its findings, and other participants could express their interest in collaborating.
Christian Muheim pointed to the existing OA Monitor as a potential vehicle for action within NAIF, while Annette Guignard mentioned the new “OA Cost Monitor” project (led by ZHAW with several HEIs) as a relevant partner initiative. These cross-connections between actions and external projects will be important for avoiding duplication and maximising impact.
What’s next
An in-person follow-up meeting is planned for spring, likely in Bern, to continue developing the action plan.
The first draft of the Track 4 report for swissuniversities is due in November 2026. Until then, the prioritised set of actions from this workshop provides the framework for the roadmap: starting with the Simple items to build momentum, dedicating analytical effort to the Complicated ones, and convening broadly around the Complex challenges.
All workshop materials — the Trello board, Miro board, and presentation slides — remain accessible to participants and the wider NAIF community.
Track 4 is a collaborative effort. Thanks are extended to all workshop participants for their valuable contributions to Track 4’s progress to date, as well as to our colleagues for organising and facilitating the workshops and for their ongoing commitment to Track 4.
- Laurent Gobin and Quentin Gallis, University of Neuchâtel
- Pascale Bouton, Julien Sicot and Jorge Rodrigues de Matos, EPFL
- Christian Schlumpf, University of St. Gallen
- Christian Muheim, St. Gallen University of Teacher Education
- Simon Willemin and Annette Guignard, ETH Zurich