The 2026 edition of the FORCE11 conference on scholarly communications – FORCE2026 – took place 3-5 June in Singapore, hosted by the Singapore Management University. This event brought together community members across the globe, focusing on collaboration and inclusive approaches. The conference theme “To Go Far, Go Together: Advancing Scholarly Communication Across Boundaries and Disruptions” reflects a principle at the heart of DataCite’s mission – that advancing open research requires collaboration across disciplines, technologies, and institutions. As part of the conference, we were delighted to host our first DataCite Connect event in Asia, bringing together community members from across the region and around the world. Here, we share some of our highlights and key takeaways from the week.
FORCE2026 Conference
FORCE 2026 opened with a keynote from Professor Lily Kong, President and Lee Kong Chian Chair Professor at Singapore Management University. In her address, “From ‘Publish or Perish’ to Purpose and People: Going Together on Research Assessment Reform”, Professor Kong stressed that existing academic assessment systems do not adequately capture the full breadth of scholarly contributions. The presentation challenged us to rethink how scholarly work is valued, highlighting the evolution of assessment frameworks beyond publications and citations, encompassing a wider range of contributions across academia and society. This expansive view of impact echoed many of the themes that underpin DataCite’s guiding values and everyday work, including support for diverse research outputs and the connections needed to understand their reach and influence.
Beyond the keynote address, many sessions throughout FORCE2026 touched on topics closely aligned with DataCite’s mission and activities. Discussions explored metadata enrichment, open research information, persistent identifier strategies, data usage metrics, and interoperability across scholarly systems. These themes appeared across a diverse range of projects and initiatives, highlighting the increasingly important role of rich metadata and open infrastructure in supporting the discovery, recognition, and reuse of research outputs. Seeing these conversations emerge throughout the programme reinforced how deeply DataCite-supported practices are embedded within the broader scholarly communications community.
DataCite Connect Event in Singapore
Following the FORCE2026 conference, the DataCite Connect Singapore session also reflected the conference theme, “To Go Far, Go Together”. Our goal was to bring together DataCite members and collaborators from across the region and around the world to share experiences, showcase implementations, and discuss how we can collectively strengthen the metadata ecosystem. We welcomed 25 participants from 9 countries, including Singapore, Indonesia, Japan, and Saudi Arabia.
The event started with participant introductions and an update on DataCite’s current priorities and activities. Maria Gould, Director of Strategic Programs and Partnerships at DataCite, covered the evolution of our membership program, ongoing efforts to improve metadata quality and usability, and our growing network of partnerships and collaborations.
Community Use Cases
Next, we heard from a panel of DataCite community members, with presentations featuring diverse use cases and perspectives, guided by a common theme of making research more open and discoverable.
Yuyun Ishak presented DataCite Use Cases at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. She demonstrated how NTU uses DataCite to register DOIs for outputs in the institutional open access research data repository (DR-NTU), as well as subject-specific repositories, including the Earth Observatory of Singapore – Remote Sensing (EOS-RS) & Advanced Rapid Imaging and Analysis Singapore (ARIA-SG) Products Repository. Yuyun highlighted how NTU uses DataCite services to track impact, and shared feedback and suggestions to improve them.
Following on, we heard from Marcelo Garcia, describing how King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) Library uses DataCite. Marcelo explained how KAUST developed a custom DataCite integration to capture enriched metadata for theses and dissertations, datasets, software, posters, presentations, technical reports, web pages, and more. He touched on the usage of other persistent identifiers, including ROR and ORCID, to improve visibility for people and institutions. Finally, we learned about an ongoing project to create structured references for electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs). The project converts PDF ETD files to Markdown, with plans to use automated reference extraction to create and enrich citation metadata.
Finally, Daniel S. Katz introduced the newest Supporting Member of DataCite – the Research Software Alliance (ReSA). ReSA is a global community of members that advances the research software ecosystem and includes DataCite as an Organizational member. Both DataCite and ReSA closely align in promoting the visibility, recognition, and reuse of research software, and we look forward to expanding our collaboration to address key research software use cases through open scholarly infrastructure, community-led initiatives, and shared engagement activities.
Roundtable Reflections
The session ended with a round of facilitated discussions that focused on closing metadata gaps, supporting visibility of diverse research outputs, and exploring opportunities for community coordination and knowledge sharing.
The discussions reinforced that addressing shared challenges requires collaboration across institutions, infrastructure providers, and research communities. DataCite can support these efforts by providing open, community-governed infrastructure, enabling the use of persistent identifiers and rich metadata, and creating opportunities for knowledge exchange through events like DataCite Connect as well as asynchronous coordination channels. We thank all speakers and participants for contributing their experiences and perspectives, and we look forward to continuing these conversations with our community in the future, in person and online.
Our main takeaway from this week was the importance of collaboration in advancing scholarly communication. There is already momentum behind a more open, connected, and inclusive research ecosystem. Both FORCE2026 and DataCite Connect participants shared practical examples of community work around improving metadata, strengthening infrastructure, and expanding recognition for diverse research outputs. Sustaining this momentum will depend on broad participation from the research community, and there are many ways for everyone to contribute to this shared vision. If you would like to become a part of the DataCite community, reach out to our Membership team to explore ways to connect with us.
