As a membership organization, members are at the core of everything we do and it is important that we work collectively on DataCite’s strategy and long term sustainability. Over the last year, following the October 2018 board meeting, we have been working on clarifying and updating DataCite’s membership and fee model.

As a growing global community of 202 members across 42 countries, this year we hosted the Business Meeting of the General Assembly virtually to include as many members of our community as possible. The meeting focused on approving the budget, approving the next steps on the business model, and the Executive Board elections. Along with DataCite’s members, the Executive Board is the governing body of the association.

As the world continues to feel the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, access to reliable scientific information is more important than ever. DataCite’s mission is to provide the means to create, find, cite, connect, and use research. DataCite members make their datasets and other research outputs findable, accessible and citable by registering DOIs. Importantly, registered DOIs have associated metadatas.

As a community-driven organization, we continue to focus and explore use cases with our members. The persistent identification and citation of scientific instruments is a particular use case that continues to gain momentum across community stakeholders. The capacity to uniquely identify an instrument is critical for the community to gather contextual information and interpret the related data accordingly.

In a blog post four weeks ago DataCite Executive Director Matt Buys talked about the DataCite strategic priorities for 2020 [@https://doi.org/10.5438/9j86-bv91]. In this post we want to talk a bit more about the strategic priorities for this year we have regarding services and infrastructure work: a) consolidation of our services and infrastructure, and b) stronger emphasis on member-driven product development.

At the end of each year we survey our members to help us set priorities for the next year. Last year we shared the outcomes of the 2018 member survey on our blog, and now it’s time to update you on the results from 2019! We sent out the member survey last November and received 50 responses from five different continents.

With this blog post I’d like to introduce myself as the new Outreach Manager of DataCite. Being an Open Science advocate by conviction, I am happy to contribute my knowledge and experience to DataCite’s Engagement team. Before I joined DataCite, I was working for the Helmholtz Open Science Office in Germany, spreading the idea of Open Science among researchers and research institutions alike.

Since its launch in 2012, re3data has become the resource of information about research data repositories. It indexes and provides extensive information about more than 2450 research data repositories.

In recent years, the creation of infrastructures for global and unique identification of researchers has been promoted by universities, research institutions, and publishers through the use and implementation of ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID). In Germany, after a first successful project phase (2016-2019), the project ORCID DE (funded by the German Research Foundation, DFG) was recently granted a second funding phase (2020-2022).

A new year, a new decade. Since our founding in 2009, DataCite has collaborated closely with the research community to expand our services, increase our membership, and promote an open culture of data sharing.

When we launched the new version of the OAI-PMH service in November (@https://doi.org/10.5438/ppth-pz62), and retired Solr (used by the old OAI-PMH service) in December, we completed the transition to Elasticsearch as our search index, and the REST API as our main API.