CSV in many ways is for data what Markdown is for text documents: a very simple format that is both human- and machine-readable, and that – despite a number of shortcomings - is widely used. Given the popularity of Markdown for writing blog posts, using CSV to publish blog posts with tabular data should be an obvious thing to do, and we have just published our first blog post using CSV data.

Data citation is core to DataCite's mission and DataCite is involved in several projects that try to facilitate data citation, including THOR, Data Citation Implementation Pilot (DCIP), Research Data Alliance (RDA), and COPDESS. The biggest roadblock for wider data citation adoption might be insufficient incentives for individual researchers, but another major challenge is that implementing data citation is still too complicated.

This week some of us from DataCite are attending CSVconf in Berlin, and we are a conference sponsor and co-organizer. One important reason we are at CSVconf is that providing persistent identifiers and starndard metadata for research data, which in most cases are stored in tabular data formats such as CSV, is central to what DataCite is doing.

This week most of the DataCite staff is attending the Force16 conference in Portland, Oregon. Force16 brings together a large group of people who either already work with DataCite in one way or another, or are doing interesting projects of relevance to DataCite. ImpactStory is a non-profit that helps scientists learn where their research is being cited, shared, saved and more.

In a guest post two weeks ago Elizabeth Hull explained that only 6% of Dryad datasets associated with a journal article are found in the reference list of that article, data she also presented at the IDCC conference in February (Mayo, Hull, & Vision, 2015). This number has increased from 4% to 8% between 2011-2014, but is still low.

As a provider of crucial scholarly infrastructure, it is critical that DataCite not only provides a reliable service, but also properly communicates problems. The best way to do this is via a central status page, a best practice used by many organizations from Github and Diqus to Slack.

The DataCite blog has migrated to a new platform, from a hosted version at Ghost to a self-hosted version using Jekyll. The main reason for this change is that it gives us more control over the formatting of blog posts. The migration was easy as both Ghost and Jekyll use markdown to format blog posts, and the blog post URLs haven't changed.

When I started as DataCite Technical Director four months ago, my first post (Fenner, 2015) on this blog was about what I called Data-Driven Development . The post included a lot of ideas on how to approach development and technical infrastructure. In this post I want to take a second look.

DataCite Labs today is launching the DataCite Profiles service, a central place for users to sign in with DataCite, using their ORCID credentials. The first version of DataCite Profiles focusses on integration with ORCID via the Search & Link and Auto-Update services, described in a previous blog post.

This Monday ORCID, CrossRef and DataCite announced (ORCID post, CrossRef post, DataCite post) the new auto-update service that automatically pushes metadata to ORCID when an ORCID identifier is found in newly registered DOI names. This is the first joint announcement by the three organizations, and shows the close collaboration between ORCID, CrossRef and DataCite.

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.