2016 has been a year of many changes at DataCite. Since the (already not-so-new!) team joined in late 2015, DataCite has become a more dynamic and highly engaged organisation. Structural, technical and cultural changes have helped us see our biggest growth in membership ever. With our increased number of members, we are excited to continue our work in 2017 and continue building a global, sustainable, and robust research data ecosystem.
New statutes, new members
At DataCite’s last General Assembly in Amsterdam, we made important changes to our statutes. These changes include the revision our membership model and we opened our membership up to any organisation that shares our data sharing mission. We now have new members in all categories including some of the key players in the data sharing landscape. CSC – IT Center for Science, Figshare, ORCID, ResearchGate, TIND, Tsinghua University Library and USGS have all joined DataCite. Three potential new members have submitted their applications, and multiple other organisations have expressed interest in joining DataCite. The growth is, of course, not just in members, but in their user communities and the wealth of data and other research artefacts that are easier to discover, reuse, and cite.
Infrastructure and services
In 2016, with the help of our new application developer, we devoted an enormous amount of effort to the renewal of our backend infrastructure. AWS S3, Docker, Travis, Terraform, Papertrail, Bugsnag, statuspage.io are only a few of the behind the scenes technologies that have increased the reliability of DataCite’s new infrastructure.
On top of that, we have renewed Profiles, Status, JSON API (including Event Data), Citation Formatter, Searchand others have been renewed – and we still have great plans for them in 2017! We have also made connections with many external integrators, who have worked with us to improve our software and services for the user community – Dataverse’s integration, Impactstory, ORCID auto-update are all good examples.
Engagement and visibility
This past year, we were very busy engaging with the community. We presented at numerous conferences (RDA, FORCE2016, IDCC, SciDataCon, SSP… ), conducted webinars (Zotero, Metadata Schema, Dynamic Data Citation, Software Citation… ), and held numerous training events (Views about PID systems, THOR bootcamps, Moving Linked Open Science… ), we can only share a few of each here!
We set a firm goal for DataCite in 2016 and that was to increase our visibility, and we met our goal. Our new website, our Twitter account (with more than 5000 followers now) and this blog have all helped us share the work of the DataCite community more broadly.
PIDapalooza stands as a real highlight from 2016. It was our first joint conference with our colleagues from Crossref, ORCID and CDL. One hundred and twenty PID enthusiasts gathered for 2-days in Reykjavik to discuss the present and future of PIDs. Its success convinced us to hold another event in 2017; we will keep you posted!
THOR
The THOR project has produced a large variety of outputs in 2016. From traditional deliverables …
- Conceptual Model of Persistent Identifier Linking [@https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.48705]
- Demonstration of Services to Integrate ORCIDs into Data Records and Database Systems [@https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.58971]
- Analysis and Comparison of Persistent Identifier Use and Integration across Disciplines and Sectors [@https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.154592]
… to training materials (Knowledge Hub) and integrations (Dashboard, EMBL-EBI, CERN and PANGAEA) and events (THOR Bootcamps, Workshop: Identifiers – Infrastructure, Impact and Innovation). We look forward to more continued progress as we move into our final year of the THOR project.
Our community
The progress we made this year wouldn’t have been possible without our community! DataCite’s members are the backbone of DataCite; they move the organisation forward and increase our reach. From our new Steering Groups, our fantastic Metadata Working Group (and its new baby, the Metadata Schema 4.0 [-@https://doi.org/10.5438/0012]), the re3data.org Working Group and to all that support DataCite’s mission, we would like to send you a big thank you and wish you all the best for 2017!
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