The KOMET project aims to support the professionalisation of the metadata processes of independent, scholar-led OA journals. KOMET increases the journals' visibility in the scholarly system and their importance as publishing venues.

To this end, the most widely used open source software for OA journals worldwide - Open Journal Systems (OJS) - will be improved with functions that enable

a) the entry, curation and enrichment of article-related metadata by authors and editors, and

b) the export of this metadata to open data sources such as Wikidata.

For this purpose, an overarching PID plug-in is  developed which, by integrating validated persistent identifiers (PIDs) as part of the publication metadata, makes it easier to find and link articles from OA journals.

Analyses and tools based on this metadata increase the attractiveness of journals for readers and authors and ultimately increase the recognition and number of publications in scholar-led OA journals.

Furthermore, the integration of a citation metadata collection feature directly in OJS enables these journals to publish their citation metadata in a structured and free way for the first time.

PIDs and geographic metadata for articles provide links to academic events, physical samples, and scientific instruments. These links connect diverse research outputs and related articles across journals and scientific disciplines. Based on the enrichment of articles with geospatial metadata, i.e. locations and time periods considered in a publication, and the open metadata publication, a search platform for scientific publications is realised.

Through the innovative and user-friendly metadata collection by the actual experts, namely the authors and editors, as part of the scientific publishing process, articles in the cooperating journals can be used in citation-based evaluation metrics and semantically significant links between articles can be established.

These innovations support an open publication culture and practice. In addition, further use cases are to be identified in exchange with specialist communities (including NFDI4Culture, NFDI4Earth) and implemented in an exploratory phase in order to promote the discipline-specific recognition of OA journals. All developments will be published as Free and Open Source Software in the OA ecosystem.