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!

The DataCite Metadata Schema is the basis for the metadata you submit to DataCite. It tells you the available fields and structure for your metadata records. Many of our members have told us that they’d really like to be able to include affiliation information in their metadata in a more structured way. The launch of ROR earlier this year provides a great step towards addressing structured capturing of affiliation information.

As a membership organization we take our community engagement activities very seriously. We jump at the chance to interact with our members, whether it be at conferences, steering group meetings, our general assembly, or during DataCite Open Hours.

DOI content negotiation is one of the oldest DataCite services, launched in 2012. Content negotiation makes it easy to fetch DataCite metadata in other metadata formats, for example BibTeX or schema.org , or as formatted citation in one of more than 5,000 citation styles.

The connections between scholarly resources generated by persistent identifiers (PIDs) and associated metadata form a graph: the PID Graph [@https://doi.org/10.5438/jwvf-8a66]. We developed this PID Graph concept in the EC-funded FREYA project, and have identified important use cases and technical requirements.

DataCite is excited to announce that Sarala Wimalaratne will join our team in the new role ‘Head of Infrastructure Services’ on September 1st. Sarala brings a wealth of experience in the Open Science and PID communities and will be a great addition to our team. Get to know her better via this interview. 1. Can you tell us a little bit about what you did before you will start working for DataCite?

Following the announcement of Trisha Cruse’s retirement, DataCite has started its search for a dynamic, committed, and entrepreneurial Executive Director to build on our exceptional record of providing first-class services to the research community. DataCite was founded in 2009 and celebrates its 10 year anniversary this year. DataCite has seen tremendous growth during these 10 years, in terms of members, services, and staff.

At the end of last year we conducted the first DataCite member survey. And one of the things you told us is that relevant information doesn’t always reach you. This is obviously really important to us, so we immediately put it on our 2019 roadmap. Another development last year was the release of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which specifies how the collection of personal information needs to be handled.

It is with mixed feelings that I announce that our Executive Director, Trisha Cruse, plans to retire later this year. I’m sad that Trisha will be leaving us, grateful for all the work Trisha has done for DataCite, but also happy that our friend and colleague will be able to take on new life adventures. As many of you will know, Trisha has been with DataCite from day one. Trisha was there when on December 1, 2009 DataCite was founded in London.

As some of you may have seen at our last Open Hours, our roadmap has a new look. The previous version was fed directly from our GitHub milestones. This meshed nicely with how we operate at DataCite, but we heard from many of you that GitHub wasn’t so intuitive for providing feedback if it wasn’t already something you use every day.