Author Once, Publish Everywhere: Portable Metadata Authoring with the CEDAR Embeddable Editor

TL;DR

The paper introduces the CEDAR Embeddable Editor, a lightweight web component that enables seamless, standards-based metadata authoring within third-party research platforms to improve data discoverability and interoperability.

Contribution

It presents the CEDAR Embeddable Editor, a novel, interoperable web component that integrates rich metadata authoring directly into existing research workflows without custom UI development.

Findings

Successfully integrated into Dryad and OSF repositories

Supports ontology-based value selection and persistent identifiers

Enhances metadata quality and standard adoption

Abstract

High-quality, "rich" metadata are essential for making research data findable, interoperable, and reusable. The Center for Expanded Data Annotation and Retrieval (CEDAR) has long addressed this need by providing tools to design machine-actionable metadata templates that encode community standards in a computable form. To make these capabilities more accessible within real-world research workflows, we have developed the CEDAR Embeddable Editor (CEE)-a lightweight, interoperable Web Component that brings structured, standards-based metadata authoring directly into third-party platforms. The CEE dynamically renders metadata forms from machine-actionable templates and produces semantically rich metadata in JSON-LD format. It supports ontology-based value selection via the BioPortal ontology repository, and it includes external authority resolution for persistent identifiers such as ORCIDs for individuals and RORs for research organizations. Crucially, the CEE requires no custom user-interface development, allowing deployment across diverse platforms. The CEE has been successfully integrated into generalist scientific data repositories such as Dryad and the Open Science Framework, demonstrating its ability to support discipline-specific metadata creation. By supporting the embedding of metadata authoring within existing research environments, the CEE can facilitate the adoption of community standards and help improve metadata quality across scientific disciplines.