On April 3rd and 4th, fifty DataCite members gathered in Barcelona for DataCite’s annual Member Meeting and General Assembly. The Member Meeting provides a venue for DataCie members to help shape DataCite’s strategic direction. The General Assembly is DataCite’s official governing body and approves fee structures, budgets, and elects our Executive Board.

You might be wondering, what this pink and green picture illustrates? A few months ago we couldn’t show you this picture; the data that we used to created it, did not exist. And the answer to what this illustrates – this is simply a distorted version of DataCite search indexing frequency.

DataCite is thrilled to welcome three new members to our Executive Board. With their expertise and passion for data sharing, DataCite is poised to make an even more substantial impact on the research data community. The also represent organizations that are vital to DataCite future and – the for-profit communities, US Federal agencies, and international organizations. Please join me in welcoming Mike Frame, Mark Hahnel, and Marco Marsella!

The Association of College and Research Libraries division of the American Libraries Association (ALA) gives the Oberly Award for Bibliography in the Agricultural or Natural Sciences every two years. This summer, the re3data registry of research data repositories will be recognized with the award at the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago.

At the end of October 2016, Crossref, DataCite, and ORCID reported on collaboration in the area of organization identifiers [@https://doi.org/10.5438/TNHX-54CG]. We issued three papers [@https://doi.org/10.5438/2906;@https://doi.org/10.5438/4716;@https://doi.org/10.5438/7885] for community comment and after input we subsequently announced the formation of The OI Project, along with a call for expressions of interest from people interested in

Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) was founded in 1855 as the first hospital in the United States dedicated to the healthcare of children. It has a tradition of research that has spanned nearly a century. The research breakthroughs at CHOP have improved the lives of countless children throughout the world. A new scientific center at CHOP aims to harness and broadly share biomedical information to more quickly benefit patients.

Three weeks ago we started assigning DOIs to every post on this blog [@https://doi.org/10.5438/4K3M-NYVG]. The process we implemented uses a new command line utility and integrates well with our the publishing workflow, with (almost) no extra effort compared to how we published blog posts before. Given that DataCite is a DOI registration agency, we obviously are careful about following best practices for assigning DOIs.

On Tuesday the journal PLOS ONE celebrated its 10th anniversary (see blog post by PLOS ONE Editor-in-Chief Jörg Heber and blog post by PLOS ONE Managing Editor Iratxe Puebla and PLOS Advocacy Director Catriona MacCallum). PLOS ONE (and PLOS) have changed scholarly publishing in many ways, from a DataCite perspective probably most importantly via the data policy updated in February 2014 that states that PLOS ONE was not the first journal with a

Eating your own dog food is a slang term to describe that an organization should itself use the products and services it provides. For DataCite this means that we should use DOIs with appropriate metadata and strategies for long-term preservation for the scholarly outputs we produce.

2016 has been a year of many changes at DataCite. Since the (already not-so-new!) team joined in late 2015, DataCite has become a more dynamic and highly engaged organisation. Structural, technical and cultural changes have helped us see our biggest growth in membership ever. With our increased number of members, we are excited to continue our work in 2017 and continue building a global, sustainable, and robust research data ecosystem.

In 1998 Tim Berners-Lee coined the term cool URIs [-@https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI], that is URIs that don’t change. We know that URLs referenced in the scholarly literature are often not cool, leading to link rot [@https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0115253] and making it hard or impossible to find the referenced resource.