DataCite DOI Re-Curation Watch

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Ted Habermann and Erin Robinson, Metadata Game Changers

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One of the most interesting developments in DOI land over the last several years is the increased understanding that DOI metadata must evolve over time to accommodate addition of new metadata, e.g. identifiers for people, organizations, publishers, or funders, or new related identifiers that emerge as the resource is referenced through time. In addition, DataCite metadata now supports several new resource types where updates could be critical. For example, instruments that are used multiple times and need to be tracked with relatedIdentifiers to document that usage or projects that might experience a variety of changes over time.

This topic emerged in a recent conversation about DataCite instrument metadata. When asked about metadata updates for instrument usage, the repository manager replied: “we need to build a versioning system before we can do that”. Developing, deploying, and maintaining new systems is always an expensive process. One of the reasons we use DataCite for DOIs is to take advantage of the amazing infrastructure they have developed and maintain for us. In fact, DataCite already provides the capability of tracking provenance (DataCite, 2026). This capability was used by Strecker 2025 to explore changes in DataCite records as part of continuous maintenance and improvement efforts at repositories.

Metadata Game Changers maintains a small DataCite repository that contains mostly metadata records for internal and external projects we are involved with.  Of course, these projects change over time as we share results with our partners or write papers and blogs about what we are doing and thinking about. Also, we use our repository FAIRness tools to help identify improvements we can make to our records, and we make those improvements as we try to provide good examples of complete project metadata, i.e. bright spots (Habermann and Robinson, 2025).

The DataCite activities API provides json output with PROV elements that are a bit cryptic, so we wanted an easier way to browse these data and progress that had been made in our re-curation efforts. Our first shot at this is now available for testing. It retrieves and displays up to 2000 updated records from your repository and adds a “history” button that retrieves the history of updates for that record. The history shows the number of changes that have been made to the record, the times that changes were made and what was changed in the record. We think it is a great tool for repositories that are updating their metadata through time and it is already available to DataCite repositories without the cost of developing and maintaining your own versioning system! Please let us know how it might be improved!

Special thanks to DataCite for providing this incredibly helpful support for improving our metadata!

References

DataCite, 2026, Tracking Metadata Provenance, https://support.datacite.org/docs/tracking-provenance, accessed June 13, 2026.

Habermann, T. and Robinson E. (2025). DataCite Bright Spots – Repositories, Consortia, and Improvements. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.59350/v2may-69s52

Strecker, D., 2025, How permanent are metadata for research data? Understanding changes in DataCite metadata, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.05128v2.