As the world emerged from the global COVID-19 restrictions, 2022 will go down in history. When many of us observed the COVID -19 restrictions being lifted, geopolitical unrest, inflation, and tightening of the monetary policy started to have an impact on the global community. Despite these uncertainties, the DataCite community remained resilient and committed to our mission.
Updating our metadata schema suggestions process
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.
Mind the gap – what to expect when practicing FAIR
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 researchers can use 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 post, Xiaoli Chen, project lead at DataCite, reflects on the gap between acknowledging FAIR and practicing FAIR.
Investigating PIDs for organizations – ORCID DE 2 project successfully completed
As an open infrastructure that is embedded in its community, DataCite is involved in various projects to promote our vision of connecting research and identifying knowledge through persistent identifiers (PIDs). Within the German ORCID DE 2 project, DataCite led the work package on organization identifiers – including ROR. This guest blog post by Antonia Schrader is a crosspost from the ORCID DE blog outlining the achievements of the ORCID DE 2 project.
Towards richer metadata – perspectives from three DataCite 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.
FAIR is everywhere
In this second blog post, Helena Cousijn, Director of Community Engagement at DataCite, shares what makes the FAIR workflows project different.
Finding the Proof of the PID Pudding
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….
ConfIDent about PIDs: Using DataCite DOIs for Conferences
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).
Grounding Indigenous Rights in DataCite metadata
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.
It takes a village to communicate the value of PIDs
I joined DataCite to contribute to the FAIR-IMPACT project (and FAIRCORE4EOSC but that’s a topic for another blog). Today I’m happy to share with you some of our plans and progress made so far.