As I have said many times, at our core, our strength at DataCite lies in our active community of members. Our mission is to be a world-leading provider of persistent identifier services to help make research outputs and resources findable, citable, connected, and reused globally. We seek to create value for our members through community-driven, innovative, open, integrated, usable, and sustainable services for research. In order to deliver on our charitable mission, we rely on a coordinated approach on a global scale, led by our members.
2021 was yet another year of the unexpected as the world continues to grapple with the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is in times like these that communities pull together to help each other and look for a better future. As such, our year-end-post includes thoughts and perspectives from our members and team around the world.
Matthew Mtumbuka, CEO, UbuntuNet Alliance in Malawi shared that “joining DataCite has been one of our major highlights of 2021. Our NREN members and their institutions are super excited with this development as this will facilitate the exposure of their research output. We have already held an awareness workshop for our members and there is an overwhelming interest for DOIs from the community. We are looking forward to a valuable and fruitful partnership with DataCite.”
While Ritsuko Nakajima, Director, Japan Science & Technology Agency (JST) in Japan noted “This year in Japan, the government issued the 6th Science, Technology, and Innovation Basic Plan. The plan cites the importance of management and utilization of research data, making being in the DataCite community even more essential, especially in making data findable globally. JaLC is implementing some fields of DataCite schema 4.4 toward January 2022, including the ROR ID and the language property for names of creator/contributor/publisher, which should be a significant advantage for non-English speaking countries.”
Chris Shillum, Executive Director, ORCID commented “At ORCID, we place enormous value on our relationships with our fellow scholarly communications infrastructure organizations such as DataCite. This year, we’ve strengthened our relationship through a commitment to make it easier for our mutual stakeholders to use our services together, starting with our joint webinar ‘Making the World a PIDder Place’. We are also happy to have coordinated our roll out of support for DMP-IDs in both services, and to have renewed our commitment to support ROR in ORCID”
In Brazil from the National Consortium for Open Science (Consortium for Open Science – ConcienciA), Paulo Henrique de Assis Santana shared that various efforts are underway to grow the consortium. “In addition to the initial five organizations (CNPq, Ibict, Embrapa, Fiocruz and CBPF), we have three more institutions working on developing their own open repositories of research data that will be added to CoNCienciA (and to the DataCite Consortium). In addition to these five, there are ten others requesting support to build their repositories.”
Natasha Simons, Associate Director: Data & Services, Australian Research Data Commons commented “ARDC greatly values our partnership with DataCite and its global leadership role in providing infrastructure that is critical to research. As Consortium Lead, we are able to offer DOIs for data and related materials to the Australian research sector which improves the discoverability and citation of Australian research internationally. A highlight for us this year is the way DataCite is expanding the types of resources that a DOI can be assigned to, in particular physical samples, DMPs, and instruments as this facilitates discovery, transparency and linking of research outputs and processes.”
And, Carly Robinson, Assistant Director for Information Products and Services at the U.S. Department of Energy said “The DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) DataCite Consortium really appreciates the incredible support and engagement opportunities that DataCite provides us as a member – including open hours, steering group meetings, and newsletter communications. OSTI has been able to extend this to our consortium organizations through monthly community calls, which have grown in popularity and attendance since beginning in May 2020. Through OSTI’s membership with DataCite, over 6,100 DOIs were assigned and registered in 2021 for a total of over 171,000 since OSTI became a DataCite member in 2010.”
Reflecting on these thoughts shared by our members, it is truly remarkable to recognise all of the efforts that happen on a global scale. Underpinning our collective efforts are the DataCite core values. During the strategic visioning process earlier this year, we re-affirmed our values with our members and team. These values are as follows:
━ Reliability: We develop and support reliable persistent identifier services.
━ Transparency: We make transparent decisions and engage openly with the
community in all that we do.
━ Trust: We seek to be a trusted partner for our members and other community
stakeholders by delivering services that uphold community principles.
━ Inclusivity: We support a global community and value diverse perspectives.
Our values help support our mission driven strategy and bring focus to our efforts. In aligning with our values and mission, during 2022, we will be undertaking to execute three cross pillar themes. Through a series of engagements in 2022 we will be sharing more about our planned activities and seeking further input from the community:
Finally, as we near the end of the year, I asked the DataCite team to share a few words that describe the DataCite community, team and services — here is what I heard:
In reflecting on the sentiment shared by the team, I know that 2022 promises to be an exciting year and that as a community we will further our vision “Connecting Research, Identifying Knowledge”. I would like to thank the DataCite team for their commitment this year! It has been challenging year for us all and I know with your commitment we will continue to succeed in the future. Thank you for your passion and drive throughout 2021.
Finally, as the DataCite team, we want to thank each and every one of our members and partners across the globe for their continued support and commitment. We have grown from strength to strength and this is our collective success. We wish you all a positive end to 2021 and hope that you all stay safe.
Look out for our communications at the beginning of 2022, where we will share more about our plans for the year ahead.
