PIDFest 2026 brought together many old friends in Leiden with conversations covering a wide variety of old and new topics. While it was great to see the old guard, it was also wonderful to see new faces, many attending their first or second PID focused meeting. These new faces made me wonder about how new DataCite members are using DataCite.

Simple visualizations of Crossref repository histories can help identify improvements in metadata completeness and new tools enable drilling down to details to help understand those changes.

We examine Crossref Participation Report scores for over 30,000 Crossref members to create a baseline for understanding those scores. We use that baseline to identify Crossref Bright Spots, members that have figured out ways to create and share more complete metadata. We also extend those results with a tool for measuring connectivity that provides more detail for identifiers than the Participation Reports.

Do you know where your organization outputs are? This tool helps you find them, check the completeness of their metadata, and supports metadata improvement across the entire open science landscape.

These tools facilitate finding your metadata across all of DataCite and identifying opportunities for improvements that support all of the FAIR use cases. The also support exploration of repository histories, analysis of metadata connectivity and re-curation activity across the history of the repository.

Many repositories do difficult metadata work that remains invisible and many time unacknowledged by communities that depend on good metadata to discover and understand data. Our repository tools can help repositories tell their stories and make that invisible work visible. Three examples are presented here.

It has been a decade since the creation of the FAIR Principles and DataCite Metadata Schema Version 4. Which repositories have improved their metadata to address the FAIR Principles during this decade?

Need to keep track of improvements to your metadata? Try our new Re-Curation watch tool.

In metadata land, one might say that “the details are in the details”. DataCite has options for providing details that can be used to help demonstrate research integrity.

DataCite provides some rich capabilites for supporting three important project metadata use cases: Project Teams, Project Items, and Project Relations. Almost 70 repositories are taking advantage of these capabilities and their metadata provide a corpus that can be used to describe how they are using the metadata. We use the techniques developed for FAIR Use Cases to characterize Project Use Cases using Metadata Game Changers as an example, then we introduce a tool that repositories can use to explore existing approaches to Project metadata and to measure their own projects.

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.