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

High-quality, ‘rich’ metadata are essential for making research data findable, accessible, 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, and it supports 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 creation of descriptive, discipline-specific metadata. 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.