As a membership organization, our members are our most important source of information. We try to stay in touch with all our members, look for them at conferences, and take all input seriously. However, to date we hadn’t gathered structured feedback on how we’re doing. To change that, we sent out a member survey at the end of last year. This is the first survey in what will become a yearly member satisfaction survey.

What has hundreds of heads, 91,000 affiliations, and roars like a lion? If you guessed the Research Organization Registry community, you’d be absolutely right! Last month was a big and busy one for the ROR project team: we released a working API and search interface for the registry, we held our first ROR community meeting, and we showcased the initial prototypes at PIDapalooza in Dublin.

As part of our 10-year anniversary, we want to tell you the story of how DataCite was founded 10 years ago. Therefore, we approached several people ‘who were there’ to tell you their part of the story.

Today we are announcing our first new functionality of 2019, a much improved search for DataCite DOIs and metadata. While the DataCite Search user interface has not changed, changes under the hood bring many important improvements and are our biggest changes to search since 2012.

DataCite is pleased to announce our newest service. The link checker is here! Many of you have asked for an automated link checking service to help you maintain your DOI records, and it’s now out of the box and ready for Members to use. The link checker is a custom-built crawler (based on the popular open-source tool Scrapy) that works its way through one DOI per DataCite Client per day and attempts to follow the URL registered in the metadata.

All DataCite DOIs have associated metadata, described in the DataCite Metadata Schema Documentation (@https://doi.org/10.5438/0014), validated and stored as XML in the DataCite Metadata Store (MDS). These metadata are then made available via DataCite APIs and services. For these services XML is not always the best format, and we are thus providing the metadata in other formats, most notably JSON.

First, a big pat on the back for last year 2018 saw a lot of changes at DataCite. We went from 5 employees to 8, and we released several new things, both visible and not-so-visible. Here are the highlights from a product release perspective. DOI and Metadata Registration In May, we launched DOI Fabrica, our new DOI creation and management platform to replace the MDS web interface.

Following the launch of Google Dataset Search we received many questions from DataCite members about schema.org, indexing by Google Dataset Search, and data citation in general. We wanted to make sure you had all the answers, so we organized a webinar and invited Natasha Noy from Google.

This blog post was cross-posted from the Crossref blog We’ve mentioned why data citation is important to the research community. Now it’s time to roll up our sleeves and get into the ‘how’. This part is important, as citing data in a standard way helps those citations be recognized, tracked, and used in a host of different services. This week A Data Citation Roadmap for Scientific Publishers was published in Scientific Data.

A couple of weeks ago we shared with you that data citation is here, and that you can start doing data citation today. But why would you want to? There are always so many priorities, why should this be at the top of the list? I’m sure you heard this before, but data sharing and data citation are important for scientific progress.

Your new Member Support Manager here, excited about my recent initiation into the world of persistent identifiers, and keen to learn more about the DataCite community. I entered into the world of technical support working at a large global information company, a different set up to DataCite, to say the least, but the principles are the same. I love working with people, information, and now I’m a strong advocate of Open Knowledge.