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.
On July 12, 2016, DataCite invited Andreas Rauber to present the recommendations for dynamic data citation of the RDA Data Citation Working Group in a webinar. Andreas is one of the co-chairs of the RDA working group, and he gave a throughout overview of the recommendations, and the thinking that went into them. The final recommendations are available since last fall, and the current focus of the working group is to help with implementations.
This week we relaunched DataCite Search, providing a more user-friendly search interface for DataCite metadata. We also added functionality that was not available before. The new search uses a single entry box for queries, and filters by resource type, publication year and data center. A new Cite button will generate a citation in several popular citation styles, and in BibTeX and RIS import formats.
CSV in many ways is for data what Markdown is for text documents: a very simple format that is both human- and machine-readable, and that – despite a number of shortcomings - is widely used. Given the popularity of Markdown for writing blog posts, using CSV to publish blog posts with tabular data should be an obvious thing to do, and we have just published our first blog post using CSV data.
Data citation is core to DataCite's mission and DataCite is involved in several projects that try to facilitate data citation, including THOR, Data Citation Implementation Pilot (DCIP), Research Data Alliance (RDA), and COPDESS. The biggest roadblock for wider data citation adoption might be insufficient incentives for individual researchers, but another major challenge is that implementing data citation is still too complicated.
This week some of us from DataCite are attending CSVconf in Berlin, and we are a conference sponsor and co-organizer. One important reason we are at CSVconf is that providing persistent identifiers and starndard metadata for research data, which in most cases are stored in tabular data formats such as CSV, is central to what DataCite is doing.
This week most of the DataCite staff is attending the Force16 conference in Portland, Oregon. Force16 brings together a large group of people who either already work with DataCite in one way or another, or are doing interesting projects of relevance to DataCite. ImpactStory is a non-profit that helps scientists learn where their research is being cited, shared, saved and more.
In a guest post two weeks ago Elizabeth Hull explained that only 6% of Dryad datasets associated with a journal article are found in the reference list of that article, data she also presented at the IDCC conference in February (Mayo, Hull, & Vision, 2015). This number has increased from 4% to 8% between 2011-2014, but is still low.
As a provider of crucial scholarly infrastructure, it is critical that DataCite not only provides a reliable service, but also properly communicates problems. The best way to do this is via a central status page, a best practice used by many organizations from Github and Diqus to Slack.
