As we enter the new year and look back at 2025, it’s a good moment to pause, reflect, and acknowledge what the DataCite community has achieved together while also looking ahead to the work that will shape this year and beyond.
2025: A Year of Growth, Scale, and Connection
In 2025, DataCite continued to grow in both scale and impact. Our community of member organizations and broader network of users, integrators, partners, and collaborators expanded across geographies, disciplines, and use cases, reflecting the increasing importance of DataCite DOIs for a wide range of research outputs and resources, and the central role that DataCite plays as a hub, connector, and partner in the open infrastructure landscape. By the end of the year, DataCite supported over 1,700 organizations across 66 countries, collectively registering more than 107 million DOIs and enabling over one billion resolutions annually, a powerful signal of trust and reliance on shared infrastructure.
Behind these numbers lies meaningful progress:
- Infrastructure resilience and performance improved through re-indexing enhancements, refined rate limits, and efforts to sustain stability during periods of peak demand.
- PID connectivity deepened, particularly through workflow improvements on relational metadata and integrations such as ORCID, making it easier for researchers and research organizations to connect their outputs and activities across systems.
- Discovery pathways expanded, with DataCite metadata now fully integrated into OpenAlex, and new citation relationships added via collaborations such as FAIRCORE4EOSC, zbMATH, and the Data Citation Corpus.
These advances reflect a broader shift: from simply registering identifiers toward actively improving how metadata supports discovery, reuse, attribution, and trust across the research ecosystem.
Looking Ahead to 2026: Turning Metadata into Insight and Action
In 2026, our focus continues to sharpen around utility, insight, and scalability—ensuring that DataCite metadata does real work for our members, partners, and the broader open research ecosystem.
Key areas of focus include:
Supporting Metadata Reuse at Scale
We will continue to strengthen services for metadata harvesters through improved REST API performance, regular data file releases, and user engagement via the Metadata Harvesters Interest Group. These efforts aim to make DataCite metadata easier to reuse, integrate, trust at scale, and bring greater visibility to the outputs, resources, and activities of our member organizations.
Developing Metadata Insights Tools
We are advancing development on metadata completeness and insights dashboards. These tools will help repository managers, members, and consortia:
- Understand metadata quality at a glance
- Identify high-impact improvements
- Track progress over time
This work aligns directly with our strategic emphasis on measuring and improving metadata utility, not just volume.
Enabling Community-Based Metadata Enrichment
We are also pursuing approaches for community-driven metadata enrichment, focused on key properties that support citation, discovery, and reuse, that can coexist with original records—thereby preserving provenance while increasing collective value.
Championing Emerging DOI Use Cases
We continue to develop the DataCite Metadata Schema in response to community feedback and emerging use cases. Our next schema release (4.7) will introduce support for new resource types and enhanced relationship metadata. This work reflects our commitment to evolving the schema while maintaining a strong, stable core for discovery and citation.
Supporting Funder and Funding Metadata Use Cases
We will expand our support for funder and funding metadata use cases through the development of funder-focused reporting tools to surface outputs, usage, and impact—supporting transparency, accountability, and evidence-based decision-making. We will also continue working with research and funding organizations to support registration of DataCite DOIs for awards and enable connections between these awards and related activities and outputs.
A Shared Path Forward
DataCite’s strength lies in its community of members, consortia, integrators, funders, and partners who actively shape the infrastructure they rely on. As we move into 2026, we invite continued engagement through membership pathways, community working groups, Open Hours, and other events, and our suggestions page.
2025 was a year of steady, intentional progress at DataCite. We strengthened core infrastructure, improved how metadata connects across systems, and made research outputs and resources easier to discover, connect, and reuse in research workflows.
In 2026, the focus is on turning that progress into clear, measurable value and utility. We are looking forward to continuing this work together with the community.
