At the end of last year we conducted the first DataCite member survey. And one of the things you told us is that relevant information doesn’t always reach you. This is obviously really important to us, so we immediately put it on our 2019 roadmap. Another development last year was the release of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which specifies how the collection of personal information needs to be handled.

It is with mixed feelings that I announce that our Executive Director, Trisha Cruse, plans to retire later this year. I’m sad that Trisha will be leaving us, grateful for all the work Trisha has done for DataCite, but also happy that our friend and colleague will be able to take on new life adventures. As many of you will know, Trisha has been with DataCite from day one. Trisha was there when on December 1, 2009 DataCite was founded in London.

As some of you may have seen at our last Open Hours, our roadmap has a new look. The previous version was fed directly from our GitHub milestones. This meshed nicely with how we operate at DataCite, but we heard from many of you that GitHub wasn’t so intuitive for providing feedback if it wasn’t already something you use every day.

Two weeks ago DataCite announced the pre-release version of a GraphQL API [@https://doi.org/10.5438/qab1-n315]. GraphQL simplifies complex queries that for example want to retrieve information about the authors, funding and data citations for a dataset with a DataCite DOI.

DataCite DOIs describe resources such as datasets, samples, software and publications with rich metadata.

We’ve previously shared with you our plans to migrate all of our services from Solr to Elasticsearch. (See for example our 2019 preview [@https://doi.org/10.5438/bckb-qy95] or how we’ve used Elasticsearch to make an improved DataCite Search [@https://doi.org/10.5438/vyd9-ty64]. Elasticsearch is already a key component of DOI Fabrica and of DataCite Search, and we’re in the process of bringing it to our other services, too.

When we launched the DOI registration form in DOI Fabrica last year, we purposely kept it pretty basic. We wanted to get the most-used metadata fields in front of the people who needed them as soon as possible. But it’s always been our intention to expand the form and make it more useful for more metadata needs for more people. Today we’re announcing a new and improved DOI Fabrica form that takes a step in that direction. What has changed?

Those of you attending the recent General Assembly might have heard us talk about how DataCite is at a crossroads. We’ve spent the last several years building and honing the infrastructure necessary to make it simple for institutions to create and manage DOIs for their data, and our members have created DOIs for a host of different research outputs.

DOI metadata provenance is describing the history of a particular DOI metadata record, i.e. what changes were made when and by whom. This information is now stored and provided via an API for all DOI registrations since March 10, 2019. The following provenance information is now available via a new /activities REST API endpoint: prov:wasGeneratedBy . The unique identifier for the activity making changes to a DOI record.

As part of our 10-year anniversary, we want to tell you the story of how DataCite was founded 10 years ago. Therefore, we approached several people ‘who were there’ to tell you their part of the story. This guest blog post is by Frauke Ziedorn, who was TIB’s DOI Service Manager from 2010 until 2015 and the first co-chair of DataCite’s Metadata Working Group. I came to the TIB and DataCite in 2010.

On April 1, DataCite organized its yearly member meeting and General Assembly. This year it was not just a chance to present and discuss DataCite’s current activities, but also a celebration as we look back on 10 very successful DataCite years!