We will follow up with a blog post later this week explaining the DataCite auto-update implementation. Since ORCID’s inception, our key goal has been to unambiguously identify researchers and provide tools to automate the connection between researchers and their creative works. We are taking a big step towards achieving this goal today, with the launch of Auto-Update functionality in collaboration with Crossref and DataCite.

Three years ago today Open Researcher & Contributor ID (ORCID) launched its service at the Outreach Meeting in Berlin. One of many tweets from the launch day: Executive Director Laure Haak was written a nice blog post summarizing the achievements in the past few years, going from 0 to 1.7 million registered users, 400 members, and a staff of 20. Congratulations!

This blog post provides more detail for a short presentation I will give today at the Software Credit Workshop in London.

The Force11 Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles (Data Citation Synthesis Group, 2014) highlight the importance of giving scholarly credit to all contributors: The EC-funded THOR project that DataCite is involved in addresses these issues, and I have summarized the findings of one of our first reports in a previous blog post.

One of my personal highlights in last week's Research Data Alliance (RDA) 6th Plenary Meeting in Paris was the Data Packages Birds of a Feather (BoF), organized by Rufus Pollock from the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN). He highlighted the urgent need for packacking data in a standard format to facilitate reuse, and described the extensive work the OKFN has done on data packages.

The Research Data Alliance 6th Plenary last week discussed numerous topics very relevant to DataCite. Below is a short subjective list of topics I found interesting. If you attended RDA, feel free to add your thoughts in the comments.

Yesterday DataCite and ePIC co-hosted the workshop Persistent Identifiers: Enabling Services for Data Intensive Research. Below is a short summary of the tweets, all using the hashtag #pid_paris. The last tweet shows the views from the reception. If you have any questions or comments about the event, use the hashtag #pid_paris on Twitter, or use the comments of this blog.

One of the first tasks for DataCite in the European Commission-funded THOR project, which started in June, was to contribute to a comparison of the ORCID and DataCite metadata standards.

We launched this blog six weeks ago on a hosted version of Ghost, the open source blogging platform. Ghost doesn't have all the features of Wordpress or other more mature blogging platforms, but it is a pleasure to use. The other alternative would have been to put the blog up on the Drupal-based main DataCite website, but Drupal is really a content-management system and usually not the best choice for a serious blog.

Last week Jennifer Lin shared information on the Making Data Count (MDC) project on this blog. MDC is a project funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) to design and develop metrics that track and measure data use – data-level metrics (DLM). Funding for the 12 month project ends October 1st, with a no-cost extension until March 1st.

CSV (comma-separated values) is a popular file format for data. It is popular because it is very simple: CSV is text-based and any application that can open text files can read or write CSV. This makes it a good fit for digital preservation. We don't know how many of the datasets in DataCite use CSV because the format metadata attribute is not used much (this query gives you some examples), but we know that the number is big.