A new collaboration between GREI and Metadata Game Changers delivers an open-source tool to help any repository visualize, measure, and enhance metadata completeness.

The DataCite Community includes over 3000 repositories operated by over 1700 members. Bright Spots serve as examples that the entire community can learn from to overcome obstacles and develop effective processes for creating more complete metadata. It is our pleasure to identify repositories and consortia with outstanding metadata completeness and repositories that have improved their metadata in the last six months. Congratulations to all - keep up the good work!

Most (89%) of the metadata records in the global research infrastructure that include funder metadata also include identifiers for the awards made by funders (award numbers). Can these award metadata be used to help identify metadata errors related to acronyms and tricky organization names?

DataCite metadata has the tools needed to track contributions from specific awards but there are many obstacles on the journey of award numbers into complete metadata. This post explores the landscape. Funder names and identifiers, i.e. Crossref Funder IDs and RORs, are more common than award numbers.

Comparison of Crossref Participation Report data shows remarkable growth in the percentage of abstracts, ORCID iDs, licenses and resource links in Crossref metadata over the last six years. Many thanks to Crossref for building the foundation!

The DataCite metadata schema recently added “Coverage” to the dateType vocabulary. This adds important capabilities for describing recently added resource types: awards, instruments, and projects.

The DataCite community includes repositories that have overcome obstacles that the whole community faces to create metadata that are very complete for four FAIR use cases. Over 3000 DataCite repositories were analyzed and ten Bright Spots are recognized for outstanding completeness above 49%. Congratulations and thanks to these repositories as great examples for all of us.

The DataCite metadata schema continues to improve, increasing the number of resource types that can be described, the number of relations between resources, and the number of identifiers. Together these improvements continue the long-term trend towards more FAIR research resources connected to form a growing global research infrastructure.

2024 was a banner year for dataset resources in DataCite. The National Institute of Fusion Science registered over 10,000,000 datasets. These metadata are remarkably complete - a bright spot demonstrating great metadata at scale.

DataCite facets can provide overviews of DataCite repositories and also provide insights into repository characteristics and potential opportunities for improving repository content. Contact us if you would like a complimentary report for your repository.

The INFORMATE Project has combined three data sources to explore how the global research infrastructure might help the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and other federal agencies identify and characterize the impact of their support. The data sources are the NSF Award Database, the NSF Public Access Repository (PAR), and the global research infrastructure as viewed through CHORUS.

Identifying researchers and their affiliated organizations uniquely and unambiguously facilitates connecting contributions these researchers have made to the growing understanding of the Mo’orea Ecosystem and others like it around the world.

Connectivity measures how well research objects or collections of research objects are identified and connected to the global research infrastructure through the PID Graph. These connections depend on identifiers for all kinds of research objects. Here I focus on people and organizations, typically identified by ORCIDs and RORs.

The University of Bath Research Data Archive has added ORCIDs and RORs to their metadata. They were already a brightSpot among Universities at DataCite. Now they are even brighter!

Comparison of content from the global research infrastructure retrieved from CHORUS and the NSF Public Access Repository indicates that using current infrastructure effectively could significantly increase PAR content and, subsequently, our understanding of the impact of NSF funding across many domains.

Version 4.5 of the DataCite Metadata Schema\ includes several changes supporting the identification and description of instruments. Several DataCite members were describing instruments in DataCite metadata before this capability was introduced and others are beginning to do it now. These existing efforts can inform the development of community conventions and help the broader community understand how to use instrument metadata effectively.

“Project” is being added to the DataCite ResourceTypeGeneral vocabulary in the next release. Many DataCite members are already describing projects with DataCite metadata. Establishing a baseline is a step towards establishing community guidelines and examples of good ideas for how projects might be used.

Instruments can now be identified and connected to other resources using the DataCite metadata schema. Instruments are behind every set of scientific observations so this is a big step towards improved science.

Universities with the most complete FAIR DataCite metadata are identified using a community convention for FAIR DataCite metadata that support findability with text and identifiers, connections and contacts.