Eating your own dog food is a slang term to describe that an organization should itself use the products and services it provides. For DataCite this means that we should use DOIs with appropriate metadata and strategies for long-term preservation for the scholarly outputs we produce.

2016 has been a year of many changes at DataCite. Since the (already not-so-new!) team joined in late 2015, DataCite has become a more dynamic and highly engaged organisation. Structural, technical and cultural changes have helped us see our biggest growth in membership ever. With our increased number of members, we are excited to continue our work in 2017 and continue building a global, sustainable, and robust research data ecosystem.

In 1998 Tim Berners-Lee coined the term cool URIs [-@https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI], that is URIs that don’t change. We know that URLs referenced in the scholarly literature are often not cool, leading to link rot [@https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0115253] and making it hard or impossible to find the referenced resource.

Today we are launching a new version of the DataCite API at http://api.datacite.org. This new version includes numerous bug fixes and now includes related resources (e.g. data centers, members or contributors) according to the JSONAPI spec. The changelog can be found here. Current users of the API should watch out for breaking changes in the meta object used for faceting.

The scholarly research community has come to depend on a series of open identifier and metadata infrastructure systems to great success. Content identifiers (through DataCite and Crossref) and contributor identifiers (through ORCID) have become foundational infrastructure for the community.

DataCite is delighted to welcome the Tsinghua University Library to the DataCite community! The Tsinghua University Library supports the University’s mission of education and research. It engages with the ongoing environment to deliver world-class physical and digital content and services critical to research, education, and outreach, contributes to discover, preserve, and disseminate knowledge and creative expression worldwide.

DataCite is pleased to welcome USGS to the DataCite community. USGS is one of the largest government scientific agencies in the world and was created by an act of the US Congress over 125 years ago. With vast holdings in Earth and biological data, USGS is leading the way with research into ecosystems, climate and land use change, energy and mineral assessments, environmental health, natural hazards, and water resources.

As we mentioned in our last blog post, DataCite recently changed its membership model, and we now invite members from all types of organisations to join DataCite. As a result, we are happy to announce that several organisations have joined DataCite. Over the coming months, we will introduce DataCite’s newest members to the community. Today we are introducing you TIND, the first for-profit organization to join DataCite – welcome TIND.

We are happy to announce the relaunch of our DOI Citation Formatting service, available at http://citation.crosscite.org. The service uses the citeproc.js library by Frank Bennett together with the more than 5,000 citation styles made available by the citationstyles.org project. The service works with DOIs from Crossref, mEDRA and ISTIC in addition to DataCite DOIs.

It has been a busy few months at DataCite, but we want to share some important information about changes to DataCite’s membership model. Earlier this year DataCite members voted to revise our membership model and open membership up to any organization that shares our data sharing mission. Previously DataCite limited membership to non-profit organizations.

Many things have changed in the last two years in the research community. Data publication and data citation are becoming a standard in different communities, and DataCite is proud to support the development of best practices and services for these emerging initiatives. In 2014, the DataCite Metadata Schema 3.1 was launched to support better affiliation information and new relation types.