Towards richer metadata – perspectives from three DataCite projects

Kelly Stathis, Xiaoli Chen, Cody Ross and Paul Vierkant FAIR Workflows, IGSN, Metadata, NFDI4Ing, Projects

Metadata is at the heart of DOIs and open scholarly infrastructure. At DataCite, our metadata schema defines what metadata properties can be included through DOI registration. The schema currently includes just six required properties—identifier (the DOI), creator, title, publication year, publisher, and resource type—along with 14 recommended and optional properties. 

On the one hand, requiring only six metadata properties keeps the schema flexible and makes it easy to get started with DOI registration. At the same time, we want to encourage all DataCite Metadata Schema users to go beyond the mandatory properties and to share rich metadata that includes all available information about a given resource. This is especially important for metadata properties that are essential for discoverability—such as description and subject—and building connections between PIDs—including identifiers for related resources, people, and organizations. Keeping metadata up-to-date is also critical to ensure that the “persistent” part of persistent identifiers lives up to its full potential.

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Finding the Proof of the PID Pudding

Alice Meadows, Josh Brown and Natasha Simons Guest blog post

If you’re reading this blog post, the chances are you’re a bit of a PID enthusiast. You understand the value of PIDs and their metadata, and you advocate for them to be widely adopted and implemented so that everyone can benefit from them. But sometime, somewhere, someone is going to ask you for proof that investing in PIDs is really worthwhile. And, other than anecdotally and/or for small and quite specific use cases, such as this simulator developed by Portuguese funder FCT, that proof has been largely lacking — until recently….

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ConfIDent about PIDs: Using DataCite DOIs for Conferences

Kelly Stathis and Matt Buys Metadata, Metadata Schema

The ConfIDent project focuses on the development of a service platform for scientific events. ConfIDent aims to help researchers find relevant conferences in their field and to share information about conferences. The project is led by TIB – German National Library of Science and Technology and the Department of Information Systems & Databases at RWTH Aachen University (Chair of Computer Science 5).

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Grounding Indigenous Rights in DataCite metadata

Kelly Stathis, Janette Hamilton-Pearce, Felicia Garcia, Corrie Roe and Ashley Rojas Guest blog post, Metadata, Metadata Schema

Local Contexts is an organization dedicated to supporting Indigenous communities to manage their intellectual and cultural property, cultural heritage, environmental data and genetic resources within digital environments. Local Contexts recognizes the inherent sovereignty that Indigenous communities have over knowledge and data that comes from their lands, territories, and waters.

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Call for nominations: join a DataCite steering or working group!

Helena Cousijn, Sarala Wimalaratne and Kelly Stathis Call for nominations

DataCite is a membership and community organization and we encourage involvement from people that share our vision. To help guide and support our growth and ongoing development, DataCite has two Steering Groups—the Services and Technology Steering Group (STSG) and the Community Engagement Steering Group (CESG) —and a Metadata Working Group (WG). These groups provide a venue for participation by interested community members and help us with priority setting and identify strategies related to our services, metadata, and outreach.

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The pitfalls of traditional workflows – with a silver lining

Zefan Zheng and Xiaoli Chen FAIR Workflows, Projects

Implementing FAIR Workflows: A Proof of Concept Study in the Field of Consciousness is a 3-year project funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation. In this project, DataCite works with a number of partners on providing an exemplar workflow that can be used by researchers to implement FAIR practices throughout their research lifecycle. In this monthly blog series, the different project participants will share perspectives on FAIR practices and recommendations.
In this first blog post, we hear from Zefan Zheng, who is doing his PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics and responsible for the neuroscience experiments in the project.

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