Mekelle University (MU), founded in 2000 and located in Tigray, Northern Ethiopia, is a research-intensive institution dedicated to advancing knowledge, economic growth, and social welfare both nationally and internationally. As a founding member of the Ethiopian Research Universities Forum in 2025, MU is committed to elevating the visibility and impact of Ethiopian research on the global stage.

The DataCite team traveled to Brisbane for the International Data Week 2025, the leading international conference on research data. It is jointly organised by the International Science Council’s Committee on Data (CODATA) and World Data System (WDS), and the Research Data Alliance (RDA). It was a great opportunity to connect with familiar and new faces.

As a nonprofit membership association and open infrastructure provider for research organizations around the world, DataCite’s day-to-day operations and strategic directions are actively shaped by ongoing community engagement and input.  DataCite steering and working groups are one of the primary ways in which community members can get more involved in our work.

This month, a quiet yet momentous event occurred in DataCite infrastructure: the registration of our 100 millionth DOI.  100 million is a huge number. And it says a lot about global adoption of DataCite and the scale of our community and infrastructure.  But the bigger story behind this exciting headline is about what this number represents. So we are marking the milestone with a few reflections about its broader significance.

The Arab States Research and Education Network (ASREN) and the Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East (SESAME) have partnered to advance open science and research data management in the region. Through support from DataCite’s Global Access Fund (GAF), this collaboration focuses on building the technical infrastructure needed to support experimental data in line with the FAIR principles.

In Côte d’Ivoire, the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research began implementing open science before the signing of the 2021 UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science.

DataCite and OpenAlex have launched a new integration to amplify the discoverability and impact of open research, with over 92 million DataCite DOIs now available in OpenAlex. DataCite member organizations that register DOIs will now see their research outputs and resources indexed in OpenAlex.

Through the partnership between DataCite and IGSN e.V. , DataCite services can be used to register International Generic Sample Numbers (IGSN IDs) for material samples. The blog series ‘ IGSN ID Implementation Exemplars ’ showcases sample management workflows developed by the community that incorporate IGSN ID registration.

Members are the heart of the DataCite community. Comprising 1600+ research organizations from 60+ countries, members join DataCite to use our infrastructure and services, participate in our governance, and contribute to shared communities of practice. In this post, we wanted to welcome the new organizations that have joined DataCite in the first half of 2025, and highlight a few of their stories.

With support from DataCite’s Global Access Fund (GAF) in 2024, Eko-Konnect Research and Education Initiative launched a pilot project aimed at enhancing the digital preservation of Nigerian cultural artefacts and expanding the use of persistent identifiers (PIDs) in the country’s research and heritage sectors.

The National Institute for Fusion Science (NIFS) is an inter-university research institute based in Japan. NIFS promotes academic collaborative research and also strives to meet the expectations of the industrial sector, which is beginning to engage with fusion energy development, as well as students, including those pursuing recurrent education.