After six years as DataCite Technical Director, I am both sad and excited to announce that I will be leaving DataCite, beginning a new adventure as an independent developer for the invenioRDM project on August 1st. My focus will remain on research data management, but with a different angle. A lot has changed since 2015 at DataCite in general, and the DataCite technical architecture in particular.

DataCite is a DOI registration agency that enables the registration of scholarly content with a persistent identifier (DOI) and metadata. This content can then be searched for, reused, and connected to other scholarly resources. But how does the underlying infrastructure enable this? In this blog post, we will describe what we have built to make this work. This is a fairly technical post, as I tried to go a little deeper into the details.

DataCite and IGSN are pleased to announce their roadmap towards a partnership that intends to support the global adoption, implementation, and use of physical sample identifiers.  This collaboration is aligned with our respective missions and brings together the strengths of each organization for the benefit of the research community.

Metadata that describes scientific software in standard ways – in particular citation metadata such as title, authors, publication year, and venue – is essential for proper software citation implementation. The metadata should be generated by the software author, stored in the code repository, included in submissions to journals, and archived with the source code in a software archive.

Are you interested in helping build discovery services for scholarly content? We are looking for an application developer to join our DataCite team, bringing a mix of skills that complement the existing team capacity. The ideal candidate has experience writing open source software and a basic understanding of scholarly communication infrastructure. DataCite has a fully remote team with staff in several European countries and the United States.

Despite the challenges over the last year, we are pleased to share some exciting news about launching the brave new PID, DMP IDs. Two years ago we set out a plan in collaboration with the University of California Curation Center and the DMPTool to bring DMP IDs to life.

Many things have happened since the DataCite Metadata Working Group last released a new version of its schema in the summer of 2019. Indeed, amongst a long list of transformations brought about by the ongoing global pandemic, the paramount importance of accessing research data has been made clear to all as a requirement to accelerate trustworthy and evidenced-based science.

We are happy to announce that we are taking the final steps on our way to providing you with all the relevant information you need. We outlined this transition already last year, meaning to move away from our current mailing lists to mailing lists that will be based on member information available in DataCite Fabrica. We are excited to announce that this step will happen this week.

Last month I shared our Vision 2021 that puts into action the goals set out in our strategic plan. In this post I want to share about our strategic visioning activity that we will collectively embark on as a community. As a community we are driven by our mission and vision: Our Vision: Connecting research, identifying knowledge. Our Mission: DataCite’s mission is to be the world’s leading provider of persistent identifiers for research.

DataCite Open Hours are an opportunity for anyone in the community to hear the latest updates, ask questions and engage with DataCite staff and other community members. Sometimes there’s even a festive pub quiz! Open Hours also provides an informal, interactive forum to learn from and share with the DataCite community and gather feedback for our roadmap, which is essential to our mission.

For the last 3 years, we have been sending an annual survey to our members (for previous results, see https://doi.org/10.5438/0x81-y943 and https://doi.org/10.5438/99ne-g618) to receive input which helps us reflect on how we did and how we can improve moving forward. In this blog post, we want to share the outcomes of the 2020 survey and also take the opportunity to look at some of the changes we see compared to previous surveys.