At the end of last year we conducted the first DataCite member survey. And one of the things you told us is that relevant information doesn’t always reach you. This is obviously really important to us, so we immediately put it on our 2019 roadmap.
Another development last year was the release of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which specifies how the collection of personal information needs to be handled. Recently, DataCite released its new privacy policyproviding information on our practices associated with handling personal information.
These two development made us realize we had to develop something that will help us improve our member data: a new member form in DOI 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, e.g. a primary contact, a technical contact, and a voting contact. If you login to DOI Fabrica and go to the settings tab, you will be able to update provider information there. Don’t forget to actually click ‘update provider’, otherwise you’ll just see the old information. You can find the relevant documentation on our support pages. A subset of the information gathered in the form is also 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.
We currently use two mailing lists to distribute information, the ‘allmembers’ list and the ‘allusers’ list. As the name implies, the allmembers list consists of DataCite members, whereas the allusers lists is being used for clients and technical contacts. Now that we’re collecting better contact information, we will start using this information to redo our mailing lists. You will receive more information about this through the current mailing lists, but we already want to announce that by the end of the year the mailing lists will be based on the information that you provide DataCite via Fabrica.
In summary, going forward, the information entered on this form will become the source of truth. We will no longer be pulling in information from different sources, but we will rely on the information that you enter in Fabrica. It is therefore extremely important that you update this information now, but also that you continue to update the form when there are changes within your organization. Good communication is one of our top priorities, so please help us reach the right people in your organization.
Helena Cousijn
