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.

The DataCite blog has migrated to a new platform, from a hosted version at Ghost to a self-hosted version using Jekyll. The main reason for this change is that it gives us more control over the formatting of blog posts. The migration was easy as both Ghost and Jekyll use markdown to format blog posts, and the blog post URLs haven't changed.

When I started as DataCite Technical Director four months ago, my first post (Fenner, 2015) on this blog was about what I called Data-Driven Development. The post included a lot of ideas on how to approach development and technical infrastructure. In this post I want to take a second look.

DataCite Labs today is launching the DataCite Profiles service, a central place for users to sign in with DataCite, using their ORCID credentials. The first version of DataCite Profiles focusses on integration with ORCID via the Search & Link and Auto-Update services, described in a previous blog post.

This Monday ORCID, CrossRef and DataCite announced (ORCID post, CrossRef post, DataCite post) the new auto-update service that automatically pushes metadata to ORCID when an ORCID identifier is found in newly registered DOI names. This is the first joint announcement by the three organizations, and shows the close collaboration between ORCID, CrossRef and DataCite.

We will follow up with a blog post later this week explaining the DataCite auto-update implementation. Since ORCID’s inception, our key goal has been to unambiguously identify researchers and provide tools to automate the connection between researchers and their creative works. We are taking a big step towards achieving this goal today, with the launch of Auto-Update functionality in collaboration with Crossref and DataCite.

Three years ago today Open Researcher & Contributor ID (ORCID) launched its service at the Outreach Meeting in Berlin.

This blog post provides more detail for a short presentation I will give today at the Software Credit Workshop in London. The aim is to look at the infrastructure pieces needed for software discovery and credit, and at the workflows linking these different parts of the infrastructure.

The Force11 Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles (Data Citation Synthesis Group, 2014) highlight the importance of giving scholarly credit to all contributors: Data citations should facilitate giving scholarly credit and normative and legal attribution to all contributors to the data, recognizing that a single style or mechanism of attribution may not be applicable to all data.

One of my personal highlights in last week's Research Data Alliance (RDA) 6th Plenary Meeting in Paris was the Data Packages Birds of a Feather (BoF), organized by Rufus Pollock from the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN). He highlighted the urgent need for packacking data in a standard format to facilitate reuse, and described the extensive work the OKFN has done on data packages.

The Research Data Alliance 6th Plenary last week discussed numerous topics very relevant to DataCite. Below is a short subjective list of topics I found interesting. If you attended RDA, feel free to add your thoughts in the comments. And if you didn't attend, you can still provide feedback.