Front Matter describes the content preceding the main text of a book or journal. In science, several research journals, including PLOS Biology , Nature, and Science , have Front Matter sections, used for news, opinions, and other content that are not research articles.

After six years as DataCite Technical Director, I am both sad and excited to announce that I will be leaving DataCite, beginning a new adventure as an independent developer for the invenioRDM project on August 1st. My focus will remain on research data management, but with a different angle. A lot has changed since 2015 at DataCite in general, and the DataCite technical architecture in particular.

DataCite is a DOI registration agency that enables the registration of scholarly content with a persistent identifier (DOI) and metadata. This content can then be searched for, reused, and connected to other scholarly resources. But how does the underlying infrastructure enable this? In this blog post, we will describe what we have built to make this work. This is a fairly technical post, as I tried to go a little deeper into the details.

Metadata that describes scientific software in standard ways – in particular citation metadata such as title, authors, publication year, and venue – is essential for proper software citation implementation. The metadata should be generated by the software author, stored in the code repository, included in submissions to journals, and archived with the source code in a software archive.

DataCite and the FREYA project partners are proud to announce the official launch of DataCite Commons today.

Access to some DataCite resources and services requires authentication so that DataCite knows who is making a request. This includes Fabrica, our DOI registration service that requires a member account, but also our integration with ORCID in the Profiles service, where researchers authenticate with us to allow us to send information about content with DataCite DOIs authored by them to their ORCID record.

Metadata are essential for finding, accessing, and reusing scholarly content, i.e. to increase the FAIRness [Wilkinson et al. (2016)] of datasets and other scholarly resources.

Today DataCite is proud to announce the launch of DataCite Commons, available at https://commons.datacite.org. DataCite Commons is a discovery service that enables simple searches while giving users a comprehensive overview of connections between entities in the research landscape.

In May, the Make Data Count team announced that we have received additional funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for work on the Make Data Count (MDC) initiative.

Today DataCite launches a new API that powers the PID Graph, the graph formed by scholarly resources described by persistent identifiers (PIDs) and the connections between them. The API is powered by GraphQL, a widely adopted Open Source technology that enables queries of this graph, addressing use cases of our community in ways that were not possible before.

In a blog post four weeks ago DataCite Executive Director Matt Buys talked about the DataCite strategic priorities for 2020 (Buys, 2020). 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.