The DataCite community includes repositories that have overcome obstacles that the whole community faces to create metadata that are very complete for four FAIR use cases. Over 3000 DataCite repositories were analyzed and ten Bright Spots are recognized for outstanding completeness above 49%. Congratulations and thanks to these repositories as great examples for all of us.

The DataCite metadata schema continues to improve, increasing the number of resource types that can be described, the number of relations between resources, and the number of identifiers. Together these improvements continue the long-term trend towards more FAIR research resources connected to form a growing global research infrastructure.

2024 was a banner year for dataset resources in DataCite. The National Institute of Fusion Science registered over 10,000,000 datasets. These metadata are remarkably complete - a bright spot demonstrating great metadata at scale.

The DataCite metadata schema provides many options for describing relations between research objects. This talk, from the Winter 2025 ESIP meeting, describes how the most common relationTyprs are used, opportunities for more detail in DataCite metadata, and measures of repository connectivity with bright-spots.

DataCite facets can provide overviews of DataCite repositories and also provide insights into repository characteristics and potential opportunities for improving repository content. Contact us if you would like a complimentary report for your repository.

The INFORMATE Project has combined three data sources to explore how the global research infrastructure might help the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and other federal agencies identify and characterize the impact of their support. The data sources are the NSF Award Database, the NSF Public Access Repository (PAR), and the global research infrastructure as viewed through CHORUS.

Identifying researchers and their affiliated organizations uniquely and unambiguously facilitates connecting contributions these researchers have made to the growing understanding of the Mo’orea Ecosystem and others like it around the world.

Connectivity measures how well research objects or collections of research objects are identified and connected to the global research infrastructure through the PID Graph. These connections depend on identifiers for all kinds of research objects. Here I focus on people and organizations, typically identified by ORCIDs and RORs.

The University of Bath Research Data Archive has added ORCIDs and RORs to their metadata. They were already a brightSpot among Universities at DataCite. Now they are even brighter!

Comparison of content from the global research infrastructure retrieved from CHORUS and the NSF Public Access Repository indicates that using current infrastructure effectively could significantly increase PAR content and, subsequently, our understanding of the impact of NSF funding across many domains.

Version 4.5 of the DataCite Metadata Schema\ includes several changes supporting the identification and description of instruments. Several DataCite members were describing instruments in DataCite metadata before this capability was introduced and others are beginning to do it now. These existing efforts can inform the development of community conventions and help the broader community understand how to use instrument metadata effectively.