Metadata forms the backbone of open scholarly infrastructure, enabling the discoverability, accessibility, and understanding of research outputs and resources. When repositories register Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) with DataCite, they use the DataCite Metadata Schema to describe each research output or resource. The six required metadata properties ensure that each record has the essential information to facilitate citation and retrieval.
To support interoperability across systems, the DataCite Metadata Schema also includes properties beyond the mandatory six which can be used to establish connections between works, people, and organizations—all linked using persistent identifiers. Together, these connections form the PID Graph of relationships between research outputs and resources, as well as to related people and organizations. This blog post explores how repositories can include related persistent identifiers (PIDs) in their DOI metadata and highlights the FAIR Island project as a case study, demonstrating the potential of rich, interconnected metadata. This case study will highlight the connections described above between people, organizations, and research outputs and resources.
Connections to People and Organizations
People and organizations contribute in many ways to the research outputs and resources identified by DataCite DOIs and can be included in DataCite metadata in several ways.
Related people are identified in the required Creator property and the optional Contributor property. Each of these properties includes a nameIdentifier sub-property, which can be used to record an ORCID iD for the person. Where applicable, other identifier schemes may also be used and indicated in the nameIdentifierScheme and schemeURI sub-properties.
Related organizations are connected as affiliations, funders, and publishers through the affiliationIdentifier, funderIdentifier, and publisherIdentifier sub-properties, all of which can record a ROR ID for the organization. In addition, organizations can be creators or contributors themselves: the same nameIdentifier, nameIdentfierScheme, and schemeURI sub-properties support organization identifiers too.
By including identifiers that connect DOIs to people and organizations, repositories enhance the traceability and accountability of contributions to research outputs and resources. These identifiers ensure proper attribution and recognition of researchers and enable services such as ORCID Auto-Update, saving researchers and institutions time by pushing information to ORCID records when DOIs are registered. Similarly, identifying affiliations, funders, and publishers in DOI metadata supports tracking research outputs by related organizations, ensuring transparent acknowledgment of the different roles that organizations play in the research process.
Connections Between Research Outputs and Resources
In the DataCite Metadata Schema, the RelatedIdentifier property is used for connections between research outputs and resources. This property supports different types of related identifiers as well as several types of relationships, indicated using the relationType attribute.
Through related identifiers, repositories can establish comprehensive linkages between various versions of research outputs, track citations to and from related works, denote derivative relationships, and define whole/part relationships among research outputs and resources. These capabilities not only enhance the discoverability and contextual understanding of scholarly outputs but also support tracking of research impact and reuse.
Case Study: The FAIR Island Project
The FAIR Island Project is a collaboration between DataCite, the California Digital Library, and Metadata Game Changers, to support the global research infrastructure and specifically two working field stations: UC Berkeley’s Gump South Pacific Research Station and the Tetiaroa Society’s ecostation, both located in French Polynesia. The project’s aim is to operationalize the FAIR and CARE principles at real-world scientific institutions and learn from this process. In this section, “we” refers to the FAIR Island Project team, of which both this blog’s co-authors are members.
The FAIR Island Project examined the research access practices at Gump and Tetiaroa stations. Both stations had a project application form to access the station resources including housing and lab space. The application includes a title, abstract, details on the methods, the planned study area, funding information, team members, and interests for French Polynesia. We experimented with translating the project application form fields into DataCite metadata. We augmented what we had from the application with identifiers to encode connections to people with ORCiD iDs, organizations with ROR IDs, and resources with other DOIs.
With the project metadata DataCite records, we published this metadata through DataCite and registered DOIs for projects at the Tetiaroa Ecostation, run by the Tetiaroa Society. These projects can be explored in DataCite Commons (seen in Figure 1).
Contributors: Connecting Project Metadata to the Field Station
In the DataCite Metadata Schema, a Contributor is “The institution or person responsible for collecting, managing, distributing, or otherwise contributing to the development of the resource.” The FAIR Island team decided that field stations could be included as contributors and chose contributorType to be “Sponsor,” a “Person or organisation that issued a contract or under the auspices of which a work has been written, printed, published, developed, etc.” The contributorType documentation for “Sponsor” includes the note that this can include in-kind support. Figure 2 shows the metadata for contributors.
"contributors": [
{
"name": "Tetiaroa Society Ecostation",
"nameType": "Organizational",
"affiliation": [
{
"name": "Tetiaroa Society Ecostation",
"affiliationIdentifier": "https://ror.org/04p8xrf95",
"affiliationIdentifierScheme": "ROR"
}
],
"contributorType": "Sponsor",
"nameIdentifiers": [
{
"schemeUri": "https://ror.org",
"nameIdentifier": "https://ror.org/04p8xrf95",
"name IdentifierScheme": "ROR"
},
{
"schemeUri": "",
"nameIdentifier": "100501",
"nameIdentifierScheme": "local"
}
]
}
],Figure 2: Example contributor metadata for the Tetiaroa Society Ecostation, from https://api.datacite.org/dois/10.17913/F3/100501.31069.
When contributors are added to DataCite metadata, they appear on the DataCite Commons works page for that record under “Contributors.” Since we added the ROR ID above for the field station, the field station name is blue, and that links back to the field station organization’s DataCite Commons page, where all the projects are also listed, as seen in Figure 3.
Figure 4 shows how four projects are connected to two field stations.
Figure 4 also shows how projects can be nested. The four pink projects are subprojects of the light green, Island Sustainability Program through the RelatedIdentifiers (“IsPartOf”) described below.
Creators: Connecting the Project to Team Members and their Organizations
We added team members’ names and affiliations using the Creator fields in the DataCite metadata. ORCID iDs and ROR IDs were also included where possible; to find ROR IDs, we used a tool created by Ted Habermann to find ROR IDs (ROR Retriever).
We updated the creator fields with ROR IDs and ORCID iDs seen in Figure 5 below.
"creators": [
{
"name": "Meyer, Christopher",
"nameType": "Personal",
"givenName": "Christopher",
"familyName": "Meyer",
"affiliation": [
{
"name": "Smithsonian Institution",
"affiliationIdentifier": "https://ror.org/01pp8nd67",
"affiliationIdentifierScheme": "https://ror.org"
}
],
"nameIdentifiers": [
{
"schemeUri": "'
"nameIdentifier": "7483"
"nameIdentifierscheme": "local"
}，
{
"schemeUri": "https://orcid.org",
"nameIdentifier": "https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2501-7952"',
"nameIdentifierScheme": "ORCID"
}
]
},Figure 5: Creator DataCite metadata, which shows the inclusion of both ROR IDs and ORCID iDs
Figure 6 shows the list of creators and their affiliations. On the left side, it also suggests a citation for the project. All creators are included in the order listed in the project metadata record.
Including ROR and ORCID IDs makes the names and affiliations clickable blue links in DataCite Commons, as seen in Figure 6. Only Christopher Meyer has an ORCID ID associated with the project metadata. When any blue links are followed, the project is connected to the person or organization. Figure 7 shows Christopher Meyer’s DataCite Commons page and the above-mentioned project.
In addition to connecting the project to people and organizations, The FAIR Island Project wanted to connect upstream to output management plans, and downstream to journal articles, datasets, samples, and other research outputs.
RelatedIdentifiers: Connections Upstream and Downstream from the Project
In the research lifecycle, field station project applications come after teams have submitted proposals to funding institutions, been awarded funding, and planned to collect data, but before analysis and publication. This means the project application needs to connect to upstream resources like output management plans and downstream resources as they are developed, including samples, datasets, and journal articles. The project metadata uses RelatedIdentifiers to make all of these connections, with different relationTypes:
- We use IsDocumentedBy to connect projects to output management plans and protocols (workflows). This field is repeatable, so we can link a single project to multiple output management plans or protocols.
- To connect to datasets and physical samples, we use HasPart.
- To connect journal articles, we use IsCitedBy.
An important note: all resource types in DataCite share the same schema, so what we described above could be used for any DataCite resource type.
Conclusion:
The FAIR Island Case Study demonstrates the power of using existing DataCite infrastructure and the DataCite Metadata Schema to document and share metadata. The rich metadata included extends the PID Graph with identifiers to connect to people, organizations, research outputs and resources. When researchers cite the project DOI in downstream outputs, such as journal articles, datasets, or physical samples, this adds connections between downstream and upstream project artifacts, growing the PID Graph, as shown below in Figure 8. Moving forward, FAIR Island will also explore other types of project metadata, like the Research Activity identifier (RAiD).
You can continue to follow FAIR Island’s work on our website, FAIRIsland.org, or join our mailing list for updates. If you support a scientific institution or field station and are interested in this approach, please contact us at info@FAIRIsland.org.
Kelly Stathis
