Author: Sergio Ruiz

DataCite requires only a small number of descriptive elements in order to register a resource for a DOI: the creator(s), title, publisher (defined as “the entity that holds, archives, publishes prints, distributes, releases, issues, or produces the resource), and publication year (defined as “the year when the data was or will be made publicly available.”)

This past winter, the Metadata Working Group has received several comments and questions about what to do when the publication year is unknown, and/or there is confusion about whether or not to describe the original object or its digital surrogate. After considerable discussion, the Working Group members have decided to offer some additional guidance to users of the Metadata Schema. We will be making immediate additions to the documentation in the following ways.

Publication Year – additional guidance

PublicationYear : the year when the data was or will be made publicly available. In the case of datasets, “publish” is understood to mean making the data available on a specific date to the community of researchers.

• If that date cannot be determined, use the date of registration.
• If an embargo period has been in effect, use the date when the embargo period ends.
• If there is no standard publication year value, use the date that would be preferred from a citation perspective.

Digitised version of physical object

If the DOI is being used to identify a digitised version of an original item, the recommended approach is to supply the PublicationYear for the digital version and not the original object.

The Title field may be used to convey the approximate or known date of the original object. Other metadata properties available for additional date information about the object include: Subject and Description. However, only Title will be part of the citation.

If the DOI is being used to identify the original object and the publication date of this is unknown or not standard then we recommend the following:

• If there is no standard publication year value, use the date that would be preferred from a citation perspective.

If you have questions about this or other DataCite Metadata Schema issues, please visit our discussion forum.

Read more →

DataCite will be represented in the Open Repositories 2014 Conference, to be held June 09-13 in Helsinki, Finland in the context of the ODIN (ORCID and DataCite Interoperability Network) project.

Attendees will have the opportunity to meet DataCite and ORCID technical staff in the Interoperability and services through shared identifiers developers challenge. There will be no fee to participate in the challenge and ODIN will provide a prize of an iPad to the “best” project, as determined by a vote of the participating developers.

DataCite will be also represented in the discussion panel “Promoting Interoperability and Services Through Shared Identifiers” to be held on Thursday June 12. Speakers from ORCID and DataCite will discuss implementation challenges for persistent identifier registries, including community engagement and support for development of third party services. They will be accompanied by Dryad and CERN speakers, who will focus on the challenges and opportunities for integrating shared persistent identifiers.

All these activities have been organized in the context of the ODIN Project, running from September 2012 to September 2014.

Read more →

The Technical Officer leads all technology development and operations for DataCite and is responsible for all DataCite technical components as well as developing future technical concepts.
In addition, the Technical Officer will act as contact for work…

Read more →

The Data Citation Principles establish guiding principles for data within scholarly literature, another dataset, or any other research object.
These principles recognize the need for citation practices that are both human understandable and machine-act…

Read more →

Databib and “re3data.org – Registry of Research Data Repositories” are pleased to announce their plan to merge their two projects into one service that will be managed under the auspices of DataCite by the end of 2015. Their joint proposal to the DataCite General Assembly was approved at the General Assembly on March 25th, in advance of the 3rd Plenary Meeting of the Research Data Alliance (RDA) in Dublin, Ireland.

The aim of this merger is to reduce duplication of effort and to better serve the research community with a single, sustainable registry of research data repositories that incorporates the best features of both projects.

“re3data.org and Databib have agreed to the following five principles for successful cooperation:

1. Openness: the metadata and the interfaces of the joint registry will be openly accessible. Metadata records will be made accessible under terms of the Creative Commons CC0 protocol;

2. Optimal quality assurance: a two-stage workflow, with a first review of submissions by an international editorial board plus a second one for consistency, will guarantee the quality and currency of records;
3. Development of innovative functionalities: cooperative development of new functionality for the joint registry and further integration with a global ecosystem of infrastructures that meet the needs of data-driven research and open science;
4. Shared leadership: the joint registry will be lead by two representatives (one from each project) as equal partners;
5. Sustainability: both projects will work together on a sustainable governance structure and a permanent infrastructure for the joint registry.

The joint registry will be operated under the name “re3data.org – Registry of Research Data Repositories” with its editorial board retaining the name of Databib. Both registries have posted a Memorandum of Understanding on their respective websites and have exchanged metadata records in advance of fully merging their platforms and processes. By the end of 2015, the merged registry will become an imprint of DataCite and be included in its suite of services.

March 25, 2014

Dublin, Ireland; Karlsruhe, Germany; and West Lafayette, Indiana, USA

More Information:

Databib is a tool for helping researchers identify and locate online repositories of research data that has been online since April 2012. It was initially developed by Purdue University in collaboration with Penn State University and with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) in the United States. Its international, multidisciplinary editorial board identifies, catalogs, and curates a searchable index of research data repositories.

Since early 2012, “re3data.org – Registry of Research Data Repositories” has been indexing research data repositories. Project partners in re3data.org are the Library and Information Services department (LIS) of the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, the Computer and Media Service at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the KIT Library at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). re3data.org is funded from 2012 to 2015 by the German Research Foundation DFG.

DataCite is a not-for-profit organization formed in London on December 1, 2009, with an aim to establish easier access to research data on the Internet, increase acceptance of research data as legitimate, citable contributions to the scholarly record, and support data archiving that will permit results to be verified and re-purposed for future study. To date, it has registered over 3 million datasets with Digital Object Identifiers (DOI).

Read more →

Following our Strategy for 2013-2016 DataCite is working on the creation of a new website. Firms and professionals are invited to submit a proposal. You will find all the details in this document.

Read more →

DataCite makes research better by enabling people to find, share, use and cite data. We are a leading global membership organization offering reliable persistent data identification. We engage stakeholders including researchers, scholars, data centers,…

Read more →

When a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) is registered, if you supply robust descriptive metadata along with the DOI, you can make the resource more discoverable and, therefore, more citable. Persistent links to people, places, funders, and other scholar…

Read more →

The DataCite offlice is closed between December 22 2013 and January 06 2014, so it will take a bit longer to answer your contact requests.
We wish you a nice holiday season and expect 2014 to be an exciting year for the Data Sharing Community.

Read more →

Today the two particle physics theorists François Englert and Peter W. Higgs, Nobel prize in Physics for 2013, will receive their awards in Sweden.

The theorists published three papers on a new boson independently in 1964 – the first one was published by François Englert and Robert Brout, and, a month later, Peter Higgs published two additional papers. Their theories were finally confirmed on July 4th 2012 by ATLAS and CMS, the two big experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva (Switzerland).

INSPIRE – a large scale digital library for High Energy Physics – made available three Higgs discovery data sets by the ATLAS experiment a few weeks ago. One of the requirements for its publication was to make them citable, so re-use could be tracked down and the experiment receives credit for publishing them. Thanks to the CERN-DataCite collaboration each dataset got a DOI assigned, allowing the data behind to get its first citation!

Our users are very eager to share, re-use and cite more data which we are happy to support together with DataCite. The next step will be to establish a workflow that assigns DataCite DOIs to data integrated from the HepData platform. So watch out for more INSPIREHEP.DATA DOIs, we are just getting started!

Patricia Herterich, Neli Ivanova and Sunje Dallmeier-Tiessen

Read more →