We frequently receive questions from our members and clients about our current approach to testing. Some of you have accounts in our test system, some of you have the “demo” accounts introduced earlier this year, and all of you have access to the test prefix 10.5072 as part of your regular production account. What’s the difference? Which one are you supposed to use for what?

This blog post was cross-posted from the Make Data Count blog. With Make Data Count now in its second year, the focus is shifting from building infrastructure to driving adoption of our open data-level metrics infrastructure.

If you’ve gone through the effort of sharing your data, you’d like other people to find, view, download, and reuse your data. Sometimes the repository that holds your dataset will make that information available, but up to now there hasn’t really been a single system that provides views, downloads and citations for datasets across repositories.

Data citation is seen as one of the most important ways to establish data as a first-class scientific output. At Crossref and DataCite, we are seeing growth in journal articles and other content types citing data, and datasets making the link the other way. Our organizations are committed to working together to help realize the data citation community’s ambition, so we’re embarking on a dedicated effort to get things moving.

In last month’s overview of our current API landscape, we introduced the idea of our consolidated REST API, the one place to go to use all DataCite services. As part of this grand consolidation, we’re pleased to say that DOI creation is now available as part of the REST API. We’re calling on all interested early adopters who want to try it out to drop us a line. Wait. Didn’t you already have a REST API? Yes, we did.

More and more funders and publishers require research data to be made available in appropriate repositories, but determining which repository to choose or what counts as an “appropriate repository” can take up a lot of time. What is a researcher to do? Last year the American Geophysical Union (AGU) convened representatives of the international Earth, space and environmental science community to work on the Enabling FAIR Data project.

Crossposted from the COUNTER announcement from September 13, 2018. There is a need for the consistent and credible reporting of research data usage. Such usage metrics are required as an important component in understanding how publicly available research data are being reused.

Discoverability of research data is a core component of the research data ecosystem. Making data findable has always been one of DataCite’s main goals, with DataCite Search providing a tool to search for all datasets with DataCite DOIs. Today the discoverability of datasets was taken to the next level with the launch of Google Dataset Search.

Over the years we’ve developed a number of services to help our members create, manage, and discover DOIs. We’ve added features and functionality along the way that we hope helps our members and the public do useful things with DOIs. But underneath it all, the APIs at the heart of our services weren’t seeing much change.

PIDapalooza, the open festival of persistent identifiers is back and it’s better than ever. Mark your calendar for Dublin, Ireland, January 23-24, 2019 – and send us your session ideas by September 21. Yes, it’s back and – with your support – it’s going to be better than ever!

This is a guest blog post written by Ted Habermann, Director of Business and Community Development for The HDF Group. Dr. Habermann is currently leading International Standards Organization (ISO) projects developing XML Schema and transforms for ISO Metadata.