More than 200 health journals today published an editorial calling for urgent action to keep average global temperature increases below 1.5°C, halt the destruction of nature, and protect health. The editorial can be read for example here (published under a CC-BY Open Access license), and the full list of participating journals can be found here. The COVID Pandemic is currently taking up all our attention.

On August 19, GitHub announced software citation support in GitHub repositories. Citation information provided by users (using a CITATION.cff YAML file in the root directory of the default branch) is parsed and made available as bibtex file or formatted citation, currently supporting the APA citation style.

Two years ago GitHub introduced the ability to sponsor an open source contributor – person or organization. They handle (and pay for) the payment logistics for a one-time or regular contribution. A blog post from June 2019 describes the thinking of the GiHub Sponsors team that went into this service, and the practicalities of using the service are documented here.

The Front Matter blog launched last week and while the content is currently only written by me, I hope this will change in the coming months to include one-time guest posts and regular writers. One challenge is to figure out how to finance the blog in the long run.

The open source research data management platform InvenioRDM today announced the first Long-Term Support (LTS) release, usable on production services. And I am joining the effort as a participating partner via Front Matter, the organization I started this week.

Front Matter describes the content preceding the main text of a book or journal. In science, several research journals, including PLOS Biology , Nature, and Science , have Front Matter sections, used for news, opinions, and other content that are not research articles.

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.

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.

DataCite and the FREYA project partners are proud to announce the official launch of DataCite Commons today.

Access to some DataCite resources and services requires authentication so that DataCite knows who is making a request. This includes Fabrica, our DOI registration service that requires a member account, but also our integration with ORCID in the Profiles service, where researchers authenticate with us to allow us to send information about content with DataCite DOIs authored by them to their ORCID record.