In late February, twenty-four of DataCite’s twenty-seven members gathered in Amsterdam for our annual Strategy Meeting and General Assembly. DataCite members are the voting body of the organisation and work directly with data centers and the data sharing community. The focus of the meeting was evaluating how DataCite can continue to provide quality services and meet the continuously changing needs of the research community. DataCite thanks all of our members for contributing to a successful of the meeting.
The backdrop of the General Assembly was a year of rapid growth for DataCite with increased use of DOIs for data by the research community. While the organisation is facing growth and change, DataCite members collectively reaffirmed support of research sharing by making it easy to find, access, use, and cite data.
The General Assembly was a dynamic meeting, where our members voted on significant changes to the statutes of the organisation and opened a new phase for DataCite. These changes will provide a more agile process to accept new members, welcoming different types of institutions, companies or associations, and create sustainable growth and development path for the organisation.
DataCite is now opening membership organizations that share our mission of making research data a first-class citizen. We invite data centers, research organizations, libraries, publishers, and funders to become members of DataCite. By creating an organization that is open to all DataCite can accelerate data sharing, use, and re-use and stimulate new research. In so doing, DataCite will help transform scholarship and the role of data in our society.
By joining DataCite members can:
- Demonstrate a commitment to open-data and open research
- Create and manage persistent identifiers (DOIs) for research outputs (allocating members)
- Become part of a global data sharing community to advocate, learn, collaborate, and network with leaders in the data sharing community
- Shape DataCite through serving on the Executive Board and voting on amendments to our Statutes
- Advance DataCite’s data sharing mission through financial support
Meeting the needs of the community requires that DataCite: 1) operates a robust infrastructure for the creation and management of DOIs, 2) delivers services that promote and increase the impact of data sharing, and 3) builds community through outreach and communication promoting the value of data sharing. We strive to provide the best infrastructure and services aligned with all that share our data sharing vision. With over 600 data centers and integrators using DataCite DOIs, we have a responsibility to our community to provide long-lasting support for data sharing.
With these significant changes, DataCite can more effectively support researchers to publish, find, reuse and cite data with confidence in a reliable and harmonised infrastructure. 2016 is proving to be an exciting year for DataCite and the General Assembly meeting confirmed the commitment of DataCite to continue working towards its mission of a sustainable and robust organisation.
