On April 1, DataCite organized its yearly member meeting and General Assembly. This year it was not just a chance to present and discuss DataCite’s current activities, but also a celebration as we look back on 10 very successful DataCite years!
Many members – from 4 different continents- joined us, but for those unable to travel to Philadelphia, keep reading to get an idea of what happened on April 1.
Make Data Count
One of our most important projects right now isMake Data Count, a collaboration with CDL and DataONE to develop an infrastructure for data-level metrics. We are only 1 month away from the end date of this project, and in the last 2 years we achieved a lot! We therefore started the day with a Make Data Count workshop to explain the importance of standardized usage metrics and find out what the barriers to adoption might be. Even though the project is ending, we will continue out work on this, so don’t hesitate to reach out if we can help you get started!
Member meeting
To get everyone in a festive mood we started the member meeting with an 80-person DataCite cake – with 10 candles to celebrate DataCite’s birthday. Trisha Cruse also gave an overview of DataCite’s history, with input from the audience, because many members have been with us from day 1!
Following this retrospective, we moved on to the current day developments. Product manager Robin Dasler and technical director Martin Fenner gave an update on the ‘cool stuff’ DataCite’s been working on over the last year. This included simplifying the DOI registration experience, developing a first version of the PID Graph, and and the MVR of ROR, the Research organization Registry.
A member meeting wouldn’t be complete if we didn’t hear from our members, so during the next part of the afternoon we heard six different DOI stories from six different members (Daniel Noesgard – GBIF, Pierre Montagano – Code Ocean, Amy Hodge – Stanford, Viv Hutchison – USGS, Nigel Robinson – Clarivate and Tess Grynoch – University of Massachusetts Medical School). Lots of interesting use cases were discussed and we heard from many members that they’d like to share their DOI stories as well, so we’ll make sure we’ll provide a platform for this.
We then moved on to a feedback session, where we asked you which steps we should take for the ‘DataCite spaceship’ to reach ‘planet persistence’. We presented provocative hypothetical choices, such as pitting ‘building shiny new stuff’ against ‘maintaining stable services’, and the attendees enjoyed a lively discussion about balancing DataCite’s strategic priorities. We only scratched the surface of the complexities involved in getting an organization like ours where it needs to go, but we were able to gather valuable insights into the wants and needs of our user base.
General Assembly
The General Assembly is the official part of the meeting, where we discussed finances, statutes, and new board members. We are happy to share with you that everything that was put to a vote was approved and that we will welcome a group of excellent new board members soon. Watch this space for more information about the DataCite board.
Reception
After 8 hours of talking it was finally time to move on to the party (including DataCite balloons)! Many members joined us for great food & conversation at Barbuzzo. We are always really happy if we get a chance to meet with our members in person and hear from you directly what it is you are working on and thinking about, so thanks a lot for joining us!
To ensure members know how much we appreciate everything they do for is, we ended the day with a short awards ceremony. If you go to a conference and you see someone walking around with a baseball cap with a DOI on it, it’s one of our winners!
Best open hours attendance
Mohamed Yahia, INIST – rain or shine, you can always count on Mohamed to attend Open Hours and ask good questions
Craziest DOI name – Best test DOI title
Adrian Burton, ARDC
Title: The untold story of Macadamias (Collection)
DOI: 10.33625/test_doi_5c93133c538c5
Creator: Farmer Joe & Farmer Bob
Version 1 of Macadamia Growth Statistics published 2015 via Australian Macadamias Farmers Inc.
Most likely to test our API
Thomas Morrell, California Institute of Technology Library – Tom is one of our most engaged support users and you can always count on Tom to check whether something new you just developed is actually working as you expected it to.
Best feedback
Anne Raugh – Technical documentation. We asked for feedback on our technical documentation, and boy did Anne deliver! Her thoroughness and attention to detail got her added to our metadata working group on the spot.
Most extensive metadata
Daniel Noesgard, GBIF – GBIF creates DOIs for the queries its users run across various databases and links all those DOIs together as relatedIdentifiers in the metadata. It’s a great use of connections, even if the records are about a foot long.
Best support question
Sarah Callaghan – magical moment – do we need to update http to https in all our links? Was used as ‘question of the month’ in the next newsletter because we realized this was something everyone needed to know
The member we’ve all been waiting for
Co-chair of the Sustainability and Business Steering Group and one of the biggest DOI users: The Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC) – Ian Bruno
The person who started it all
Jan Brase, founder of DataCite. We wouldn’t be celebrating this year without Jan Brase, who started DataCite at TIB 10 years ago. If you haven’t done so yet, read his story of how it all began!
