International Data Week (IDW) 2022 has come to an end, and at DataCite we made sure we celebrated data the whole week! IDW is a community event that brings together the global data community to discuss how to improve research and society through data sharing and reuse.
Engaging with the community
As part of our celebration activities we participated in RDA 19th’s Plenary meeting, sharing our progress on different projects and initiatives. In the session “Persistent Identification of Instruments”, our Executive Director Matt Buys shared DataCite’s efforts to support instruments identification. In the session ”Building enhanced FAIR Workflows through use of PIDs within and between interoperable research tools”, Xiaoli Chen presented the current status and next steps of the Implementing FAIR Workflows project. Helena Cousijn joined the session Supporting FAIR in software, to discuss the Scholix schema and how this initiative could support software citation. Last but not least, we were also virtually present at SciDataCon where Xiaoli Chen and Rorie Edmunds participated in a panel discussion to discuss how persistent identifiers facilitate data sharing and the role of DataCite in Asia.
Global challenges
To illustrate how the DataCite infrastructure supports this year’s IDW theme “data for a better world”, we shared two use cases with our Twitter community. The first example relates to the current pandemic challenge: the German public health institute RKI uses DataCite DOIs to publish their data on national Covid-19 cases, vaccinations etc. Sharing this data goes beyond open science and transparency, DataCite infrastructure helps the RKI in “providing a scientific basis for health-related political decision-making.”1
The second story is related to the climate change challenge: DataCite member GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility) uses our services to share data on how climate change impacts biodiversity.
These examples present two possible use cases in the DataCite community, which currently has more than 260 members running more than 2.600 repositories. Each of the 34 million registered DataCite DOIs tells a story on how research is addressing fundamental societal challenges.
There would not be data without people!
All this data would not exist if it had not been created by researchers in numerous organizations around the world. The data could not be published if it were not for librarians, data stewards, and curators providing institutional or domain-specific services such as repositories. Finally, without open infrastructure organizations providing a robust information infrastructure and support, the data would not be found.
The IDW shows that there is “data to improve our world.” Let’s all work together to make it happen!
Gabriela Mejias
