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.

We know that software is important in research, and some of us in the scholarly communications community, for example, in FORCE11, have been pushing the concept of software citation as a method to allow software developers and maintainers to get academic credit for their work: software releases are published and assigned DOIs, and software users then cite these releases when they publish research that uses the software.

Today DataCite is launching DOI Fabrica, the next generation of DataCite’s DOI registration service, replacing the Metadata Store (MDS). This is the biggest and most important product release DataCite has done in many years, and the result of nine months of hard work by the entire DataCite team. DOI registration is the core service that DataCite is providing to its members and the data centers they work with.

While it is a best practice for DOIs (expressed as URL) to send the user to the landing page for that resource (Starr et al., 2015), sometimes we want something else: metadata , e.g. to generate a citation, or to go to the content itself. The easiest way to do that is to use DOI content negotiation.

Three weeks ago we started assigning DOIs to every post on this blog (Fenner, 2016c). 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.

Geoff Bilder from CrossRef likes to show the following slide at scholarly conferences, and then asks the audience what they see: Most of us probably immediately recognize this document as a scholarly article.

In 1998 Tim Berners-Lee coined the term cool URIs (1998), that is URIs that don’t change. We know that URLs referenced in the scholarly literature are often not cool, leading to link rot (Klein et al., 2014) and making it hard or impossible to find the referenced resource.

Today we are launching a new version of the DataCite API at http://api.datacite.org. This new version includes numerous bug fixes and now includes related resources (e.g. data centers, members or contributors) according to the JSONAPI spec. The changelog can be found here. Current users of the API should watch out for breaking changes in the meta object used for faceting.

The scholarly research community has come to depend on a series of open identifier and metadata infrastructure systems to great success. Content identifiers (through DataCite and Crossref) and contributor identifiers (through ORCID) have become foundational infrastructure for the community.