Crossposted from the COUNTER announcement from September 13, 2018. There is a need for the consistent and credible reporting of research data usage. Such usage metrics are required as an important component in understanding how publicly available research data are being reused.

Discoverability of research data is a core component of the research data ecosystem. Making data findable has always been one of DataCite’s main goals, with DataCite Search providing a tool to search for all datasets with DataCite DOIs. Today the discoverability of datasets was taken to the next level with the launch of Google Dataset Search.

Over the years we’ve developed a number of services to help our members create, manage, and discover DOIs. We’ve added features and functionality along the way that we hope helps our members and the public do useful things with DOIs. But underneath it all, the APIs at the heart of our services weren’t seeing much change.

PIDapalooza, the open festival of persistent identifiers is back and it’s better than ever. Mark your calendar for Dublin, Ireland, January 23-24, 2019 – and send us your session ideas by September 21. Yes, it’s back and – with your support – it’s going to be better than ever!

This is a guest blog post written by Ted Habermann, Director of Business and Community Development for The HDF Group. Dr. Habermann is currently leading International Standards Organization (ISO) projects developing XML Schema and transforms for ISO Metadata.

Over the past couple of years, a group of organizations with a shared purpose – California Digital Library, Crossref, DataCite, and ORCID – invested our time and energy into launching the Org ID initiative, with the goal of defining requirements for an open, community-led organization identifier registry. The goal of our initiative has been to offer a transparent, accessible process that builds a better system for all of our communities.

We’re pleased to announce that Helena Cousijn has joined our team, bringing a wealth of experience and knowledge to her position as DataCite’s Director of Community Engagement and Communications.

Joan Starr, EZID Service Manager, California Digital Library has been an important part of DataCite’s success from the beginning. Joan has made a difference with her guidance, passion, voice, knowledge — all of which has helped so many in the DataCite community. DataCite awarded Joan the Distinguished Service Award at the spring General Assembly in Berlin 2018. Her contributions are immense.

One year into our Sloan funded Make Data Count project, we are proud to release Version 1 of standardized data usage and citation metrics! As a community that values research data it is important for us to have a standard and fair way to compare metrics for data sharing. We know of and are involved in a variety of initiatives around data citation infrastructure and best practices; including Scholix, Crossref and DataCite Event Data.

For the past several years data citation has been an important topic in the research community. The community came together and agreed that data must be granted first-class citizenship in the practice of scholarship. Thus the community defined a set of guiding principles for data within scholarly literature. This is known as the Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles (JDDCP)[@https://doi.org/10.25490/a97f-egyk], published in 2014.

Today we’re releasing a special follow-up to our successful DOI Fabrica 1.0 release earlier this month [@https://doi.org/10.5438/0yk5-b755]. That’s right, the DOI registration form is here! We know many of you have been waiting for this feature, and we’re pleased to say it has arrived. You can now enter the metadata for your DOI into individual form fields instead of uploading a metadata file.