DataCite welcomed over 370 participants from almost 300 institutions across 59 countries to our Annual Community Meeting on 25 September 2024.
The DataCite Community Meeting was held across 10 sessions in three blocks and spanning all time zones, with some sessions repeated to give a regional focus. As ever, a number of sessions were designed to give our global community insights into DataCite, our current status, and the path ahead:
- Several DataCite Directors gave an overall view of the work in 2024 and our plans for 2025.
- Our new Product Team provided news on the DataCite Roadmap, including focal points in the upcoming month. The Team also introduced our Suggestions Portal on Github, a change to our process for contributing feedback for new product features and enhancements.
- Participants were updated on DataCite’s strategic partnerships and initiatives, with presentations on Make Data Count, RAiD, and DiSSCo, as well as DOIs for awards.
Following the DataCite annual vision for 2024, the Community Meeting had a focus on metadata quality and completeness. In particular, two ‘Metadata in Focus’ sessions led by Sara El-Gebali (DataCite Metadata Specialist) demonstrated how the community can harness the power of PID-associated metadata. These sessions highlighted that DataCite DOI metadata is openly available, queryable via our APIs, and can be used to create visualizations for reporting. The sessions added to a better understanding of the importance of metadata completeness by illustrating real-world examples. As such, DataCite Members and Consortium Organizations were given a picture of how the quality and completeness of their own metadata can lead to improved discoverability, connectivity, and interoperability of their research outputs.
The benefits brought by having rich, high-quality metadata were also apparent in the ‘Harvester Roundtable’. In this panel session, representatives from three organizations that ingest DataCite metadata—OpenAIRE AMKE, Clarivate Analytics, and OurResearch (through their service OpenAlex)—explained how their cutting-edge tools interact with DataCite services to expose research outputs for discovery and reuse. A clear take-home message from the session was that researchers can help others better locate their outputs within discovery systems by enhancing the completeness of the associated metadata. The session attracted well over 100 participants, who remarked in the post-session survey that they appreciated this rare opportunity to hear from metadata aggregators and enjoyed the lively Q&A session.
[The details of this session helped] …” enhance my encouragement to researchers that metadata is important, and shouldn’t be dismissed.”
Response to the post-session survey question, ‘Which elements of the session did you like most?’ for the first ‘Metadata in Focus’ session.
In our efforts to be ever more inclusive of the global community, we incorporated sessions for those in regions currently underrepresented in our member community. The Community Meeting started with a session that introduced DataCite, and shared the experiences of two institutions in the APAC region (Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development in Nepal) who are using our services. Two other sessions showcased outreach and infrastructure development projects in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America that were awarded grants under the first round of the DataCite Global Access Fund.
With the 2024 Annual Community Meeting wrapped up, it just leaves us to express our sincere gratitude to everyone who joined us during the day, to all of the presenters, and to DataCite colleagues for putting the sessions together and working tirelessly to make sure they went smoothly. It is especially gratifying that from over 200 responses to post-session surveys, greater than 75% of participants said that they found the session they attended to be very or extremely useful. We will strive to do even better in 2025. If you have any suggestions for next year’s meeting, please don’t hesitate to contact us at info@datacite.org
Rorie Edmunds
