Metadata

Breaking a Metadata Barrier: Improving discoverability with automatic subject classification

Kristian Garza Make Data Count, Metadata, Product, Projects

In the realm of scholarly publishing, the discipline metadata of outputs is of utmost importance. It is the backbone upon which works are discovered, indexed, and ultimately read. Without proper discipline metadata, outputs risk being lost in the vast sea of information in the scholarly landscape.

However, despite the importance of discipline metadata, it can be a source of frustration for both authors and publishers. The process of accurately identifying and assigning discipline metadata to a scholarly resource is a laborious and often subjective task, one that has traditionally been the responsibility of the publisher.

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Launch of the PID-network Project – Understanding Metadata Workflows

Paul Vierkant Metadata, PID Network Germany, Projects

On March 01, 2023, the project “PID Network Deutschland – Network for fostering persistent identifiers in science and culture”, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and scheduled to run for 36 months, will start. Partner institutions of PID Network Germany are DataCite, the German National Library, the Helmholtz Open Science Office, the Bielefeld University Library, and the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB).

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Updating our metadata schema suggestions process

Kelly Stathis Metadata, Metadata Schema

As a community-driven organization, we believe it is critical that our members shape the DataCite metadata schema. The Metadata Working Group consists of 10-16 community representatives, who work on improving the metadata schema based on what we learn from the DataCite community. For the upcoming metadata schema 4.5, we launched our first community feedback process this fall to gather your input on the draft metadata schema. We’ve also heard that our community would like more involvement in shaping the metadata schema before changes reach the proposal stage. 

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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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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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Proposed DataCite Metadata Schema Changes: Your Feedback Needed!

Kelly Stathis and DataCite Metadata Working Group Metadata, Metadata Schema

Over the past year and a half, the Metadata Working Group has been working on changes to support the evolving use cases for DataCite DOIs. These proposed updates are in response to requests from DataCite community members and also in alignment with pillar 3 of DataCite’s strategic plan—that is, to “identify and connect all resource types held by research organizations globally.”
We want to make sure these changes work—that they solve the problems that they are intended to solve—and we want to hear from you! For the first time, we are sharing a draft proposal before releasing the next metadata schema version.

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