It has been a busy few months at DataCite, but we want to share some important information about changes to DataCite’s membership model. Earlier this year DataCite members voted to revise our membership model and open membership up to any organization that shares our data sharing mission. Previously DataCite limited membership to non-profit organizations.

Many things have changed in the last two years in the research community. Data publication and data citation are becoming a standard in different communities, and DataCite is proud to support the development of best practices and services for these emerging initiatives. In 2014, the DataCite Metadata Schema 3.1 was launched to support better affiliation information and new relation types.

The FORCE11 Software Citation Working Group has published the results of its review of existing community practices, using a consolidated set of Software Citation Principles [@https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.86] to encourage the adoption of software citation across disciplines. Supporting citation is part of DataCite’s core mission and this extends to software citation.

Passionate as we are about persistent identifiers, we are delighted to invite you to PIDapalooza, the festival of PIDs this November in Reykjavik. Together with our colleagues from Crossref, ORCID and the California Digital Library, we have envisioned this community gathering for everyone who’s working with identifiers: digital tech experts, publishers, researchers, tool builders, organisations, infrastructure providers… and you!

DataCite is pleased to welcome Kristian Garza to our team. Kristian is our new application developer and he comes to DataCite with a wealth of experience in Open Science, web development, and data repositories. Get to know him better via this interview. Can you tell us a little bit about what you did before starting for DataCite? Before joining DataCite I have been transitioning between academia and industry for a while.

On July 12, 2016, DataCite invited Andreas Rauber to present the recommendations for dynamic data citation of the RDA Data Citation Working Group in a webinar. Andreas is one of the co-chairs of the RDA working group, and he gave a throughout overview of the recommendations, and the thinking that went into them. The final recommendations are available since last fall, and the current focus of the working group is to help with implementations.

On June 30th, 2016, DataCite organised a webinar to introduce the community to the new version of its metadata schema developed by DataCite’s Metadata Working Group. and support the different integrators interested in migrating to the new schema. http://schema.datacite.org/meta/kernel-4.0/ The DataCite Metadata Schema 4.0 comes with improvements to name identifiers, funding information, resource types, and other modifications.

This week we relaunched DataCite Search, providing a more user-friendly search interface for DataCite metadata. We also added functionality that was not available before. The new search uses a single entry box for queries, and filters by resource type, publication year and data center. A new Cite button will generate a citation in several popular citation styles, and in BibTeX and RIS import formats.

We are very pleased to announce the launch of our new website: www.datacite.org! Our website is the central place for information about DataCite and we love the new look! It has become the hub for all our services and now it delivers our latest news and supports the community with a responsive easy-to-use interface. DataCite’s mission is to help the research community locate, identify, and cite research data with confidence.

CSV in many ways is for data what Markdown is for text documents: a very simple format that is both human- and machine-readable, and that – despite a number of shortcomings – is widely used. Given the popularity of Markdown for writing blog posts, using CSV to publish blog posts with tabular data should be an obvious thing to do, and we have just published our first blog post using CSV data.

DataCite is a community driven organization, and we encourage involvement from people that share our data sharing vision. Over the past year, DataCite has seen a tremendous amount of growth and uptake in the use of DataCite DOIs.