Three years ago today Open Researcher & Contributor ID (ORCID) launched its service at the Outreach Meeting in Berlin.

This blog post provides more detail for a short presentation I will give today at the Software Credit Workshop in London. The aim is to look at the infrastructure pieces needed for software discovery and credit, and at the workflows linking these different parts of the infrastructure.

The Force11 Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles (Data Citation Synthesis Group, 2014) highlight the importance of giving scholarly credit to all contributors: Data citations should facilitate giving scholarly credit and normative and legal attribution to all contributors to the data, recognizing that a single style or mechanism of attribution may not be applicable to all data.

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. And if you didn't attend, you can still provide feedback.

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. Emerging theme: the number of PID solutions is overwhelming to researchers. What we need to provide are reliable suggestions. #pid_paris(???) September 21, 2015 The last tweet shows the views from the reception.

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. MDC is a research project and has delivered some interesting questions and important results.

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.

In the first post of this new blog a few weeks ago I talked about Data-Driven Development, and that service monitoring is an important aspect of this. The main service DataCite is providing is registration of digital object identifiers (DOIs) for scholarly content, in particular research data.