Over the course of 2019, DataCite has been working on updates to our member model, as we explained in our blog post (@https://doi.org/10.5438/gk09-ba24) back in September. As a consequence, we’ve made some changes to Fabrica to better reflect the terminology and vision of the revised member model.

Two weeks and counting! What seems like a whirlwind has passed by in a flash. Today I take a moment to reflect on my first two weeks as DataCite’s Executive Director and share some of my initial impressions. My first week at DataCite had me on my way to Edinburgh to attend FORCE2019. This was an excellent opportunity to engage with members of our community and team.

“As an institution, I want to see all my research outputs” As you know, we’ve been collaborating on ROR, which launched earlier this year, in order to make open persistent identifiers for research organizations a reality. With the most recent updates to our metadata schema, it’s now possible for our members and their repositories to add ROR IDs as affiliation identifiers in the metadata they submit to DataCite.

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.

Today is Trisha Cruse’s last day at DataCite. There will be many memories, but this being DataCite, we wanted to preserve some of those under a DOI. Below you’ll find some final words from current staff and board members. Goodbye Trisha, you will be missed! DataCite Board Irina Sens Trisha was very important for the founding of DataCite.

We’re delighted to announce a joint effort between DataCite and FAIRsharing to improve, in collaboration with several leading publishers, the criteria used by journal publishers for the recommendation of research data repositories for the benefit of the broader research community.

This is a guest blog post by Adam Farquhar, Deputy President of the DataCite Board. With this blog post, I wanted to let you know that, after a full decade, I will be stepping down from the DataCite Board. I’ve served as President or Deputy President since the day that we founded DataCite in 2009.

This is a guest blog post written by Ted Habermann. In this blog post, Dr Habermann introduces the MetaDIG project and how the project recommendations can be applied to DataCite metadata. Since Wilkinson et al. (@https://doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2016.18) introduced the FAIR Principles, discussions and implementation guidelines have been published in almost every possible context.

Earlier this year, we announced the retirement of our Executive Director, Trisha Cruse. After an extensive search, led by DataCite’s Executive Board, we are proud to announce that Matt Buys will join DataCite as Executive Director beginning October 14, 2019. Matt comes to us from ORCID and brings experience in leading global teams and scaling persistent identifier infrastructure to share information on a global scale.

As a membership organization, members are at the core of everything we do. Understanding our members and ensuring good 2-way communication is therefore extremely important. Over the last year, we have been working on clarifying and aligning DataCite’s membership model. We believe this will enable us to work with all organizations in the same way and give us more insight into the organizations using our services.

The official countdown to PIDapalooza 2020 begins here! It’s 162 days to go until our flame-lighting opening ceremony at the fabulous Belem Cultural Center in Lisbon, Portugal. Your friendly neighborhood PIDapalooza Planning Committee—Helena Cousijn (DataCite), Maria Gould (CDL), Stephanie Harley (ORCID), Ginny Hendricks (Crossref) and Alice Meadows (ORCID) — are already hard at work making sure it’s the best one so far!