As a member organization, it is crucial that all members receive relevant information from us and are kept up to date in a timely manner. For the last couple of years, we have used two google mailing lists: the allmembers list and the allusers list. Last year we announced that we were planning to replace these mailing lists with mailing lists that will be based on member information available in DataCite Fabrica. This makes it easier for members to keep their own information up to date and therefore ensure that the right people at their organization receive the right information. In this blog post, we outline some of the next steps in this transition process.
Member information in Fabrica
Last year we launched a new member form in Fabrica. This form provides you with one central place to manage all your information. On this form, we ask you to identify different kinds of contacts, including a primary contact, a technical contact, a billing contact and a voting contact.
If you login to DOI Fabrica and go to the settings tab, you will be able to update your information there. Please remember to click ‘update member’ or ‘update organization’, otherwise you will only see the old information. You can find the relevant documentation on our support pages. As you can see below, this page in Fabrica indicates that the contact information provided here will be used for DataCite communications.
Please also note that a subset of the information gathered in the form is used to populate DataCite’s public facing member page. When you update fields in the member form the public facing member page is automatically updated.
Communication workflow
Going forward, we will use a new communication tool that is able to send you emails with information relevant to you based on the contact information you provide in the Fabrica form. Future emails, such as our DataCite newsletter, invitations to general meetings or technical information, will be sent to you via our new communication tool.
We will start using this new tool on October 1st. On this day all contacts that we currently have in Fabrica will receive an email to confirm their subscription to the mailing list. You can find a screenshot of this email below so you know what to expect. We would like to ask all members and consortium organizations to confirm their subscription so that you will continue to receive emails from us in the future. When you add a new contact to Fabrica at a later point in time, they will also receive this same confirmation email. This synchronized workflow from Fabrica ensures that you and your colleagues will receive all necessary emails.
Specific actions for members
In order to ensure that you continue receiving all communications from DataCite, it is very important that you take the following two steps:
- Update your member information in DataCite Fabrica as described here. This also applies to Consortium Organizations who can find instructions here.
- When you receive a confirmation email, please click on the link to subscribe to the mailing list.
We realize that some of you may have received confirmation emails that were generated while we were testing this new process. We apologize for any confusion that this may have caused. Unfortunately, even if you have already confirmed your subscription at an earlier date, we would like to ask you to do so again when you receive the email displayed above. If you encounter any problems, please contact us at support@datacite.org and we will work with you to solve these. Thank you again for your continued support as we work to improve our workflows that support member communication.
Paul Vierkant
