DataCite provides essential open infrastructure for research organizations and their communities around the world to contribute key metadata about their outputs, resources, and activities so that they can be discovered, reused, and integrated across the scholarly information landscape.
The DataCite metadata store continues to grow, now containing records for more than 100 million DOIs registered by thousands of organizations, and the diversity of objects within the store has also changed over time. Recent and ongoing updates to the DataCite Metadata Schema reflect these changes.
As more and more organizations rely on DataCite to make their research widely discoverable, and as more and more downstream systems and services retrieve metadata for a variety of use cases, the need for high-quality metadata at scale has been more urgent than ever. Achieving this goal requires a multi-faceted strategy and is a continuous process. However, one thing that has been clear as we tackle this challenge is the importance of providing DataCite members and users with tools to monitor degrees and dimensions of metadata quality and completeness.
To support this strategic objective, today we’re launching a new metadata dashboard—a tool for monitoring DataCite metadata quality and identifying opportunities to advance the discoverability and impact of scholarly resources. Through the dashboard, you can search for any DataCite Member, Consortium Organization, or Repository to view a metadata quality snapshot and explore opportunities for improvement. Each view displays metadata completeness (as a percentage of DOIs) and top values for the major metadata properties and key sub-properties. The analyzed DOIs can be filtered by registration year, resource type, and the metadata query string syntax used across DataCite services.
You can access the metadata dashboard at https://metadata.datacite.org. Try searching for your own organization or repository’s metadata to see your own metadata completeness. Here’s what it looks like for some of our community members:
We invite you to review our new documentation for the DataCite Metadata Dashboard and get in touch with us at support@datacite.org if you have any questions.
Maintaining metadata is an active and constant effort and we hope that the dashboard will provide useful context and guidance to support ongoing stewardship. It is also a collective effort, and we therefore will continue to enhance the dashboard and other tools, while also exploring how to advance metadata quality with additional strategies like community-sourced enrichments.
We always welcome your feedback through DataCite Suggestions—your ideas play an important role in helping us to continuously improve our services. In addition, we also invite you to join us for our next edition of DataCite Open Hours, where we’ll discuss new releases—including the metadata dashboard and DataCite Metadata Schema 4.7.
Kelly Stathis
Cody Ross
