Empowering Rich Metadata Entry: How Dryad and OSF Are Using the CEDAR Embeddable Editor
As scientific data sharing becomes increasingly vital to research transparency and reuse, the role of high-quality metadata has never been more important. Yet, creating structured, standards-aligned metadata remains a complex task—especially when researchers are forced to navigate unfamiliar tools or metadata standards outside their everyday workflows. That’s where the CEDAR Embeddable Editor (CEE) steps in.
Developed by the CEDAR team, the CEE is a lightweight, standards-compliant Web Component that enables third-party platforms to embed machine-actionable metadata templates directly into their interfaces. Instead of sending researchers off to external metadata portals, the CEE brings structured metadata authoring directly into the systems where scientists already work—lowering friction, improving consistency, and aligning with the FAIR principles.
Recently, two major research data platforms—Dryad and the Open Science Framework (OSF)—have integrated the CEE to enhance their metadata workflows.
OSF: Field-Specific Metadata Within the Platform
The Open Science Framework, operated by the Center for Open Science, integrated the CEE to support field-specific metadata entry during project registration and dataset submission (https://www.cos.io/blog/cedar-embeddable-editor). Researchers are first prompted to provide general metadata and then select from a list of discipline-specific templates curated in the CEDAR Workbench. These include domains such as cognitive neuroscience, clinical trials, and ecology.
Upon selection, the CEE dynamically renders a structured metadata form directly in the OSF interface—complete with ontology-driven value selection (e.g., from the Cognitive Atlas or MeSH) and real-time validation. No additional software is needed, and the structured output (in JSON-LD format) is immediately interoperable and machine-readable.
By decoupling metadata template logic from OSF’s frontend, the platform can expand its template offerings without additional engineering effort. This enables scalable support for community standards across diverse disciplines.
Dryad: Metadata Depth for Reuse and Reproducibility
Dryad, a general-purpose open data repository, have also embedded the CEE to support more robust and reusable metadata, particularly in neuroscience and biomedical fields (https://blog.datadryad.org/2024/04/09/new-at-dryad-empowering-reuse-of-cognitive-neuroscience-data/). In collaboration with domain experts and CEDAR developers, Dryad introduced a neuroscience metadata template that includes fields for experimental paradigms, cognitive domains, participant demographics, and preprocessing workflows.
Dryad staff have noted that this integration reduces barriers for researchers submitting complex datasets and improves downstream discoverability and reuse.
A Shared Vision: Portability and Interoperability
The same CEDAR templates used by OSF and Dryad are authored once and reused across platforms without modification. This portability—enabled by CEE’s runtime rendering model and framework-agnostic design—allows for harmonized metadata practices across generalist and domain-specific repositories.
In a landscape where consistent, semantically rich metadata is foundational to data reuse, the CEDAR Embeddable Editor offers a practical, scalable solution. By embedding FAIR-aligned metadata tooling directly into data workflows, Dryad and OSF are not just improving compliance—they’re transforming usability.