DataCite Summer Meeting Report
DataCite held its first Summer Meeting in Hannover, Germany from June 7-8 and it was very successful. DataCite is a new international consortium of national libraries and data centers set up to "establish easier access to scientific research data on the Internet, increase acceptance of research data as legitimate, citable contributions to the scientific record, and to support data archiving that will permit results to be verified and re-purposed for future study."
In addition, DataCite is DOI Registration Agency and in the words of Adam Farquhar of the British Library and President of DataCite - "Datacite is to data centres and datasets as CrossRef is to publishers and research articles." It's important to note that CrossRef covers a lot more than just research articles (books, conference proceedings, technical reports, standards, datasets). DataCite and CrossRef are serving different communities so scholarly publishers who are members of CrossRef will still register datasets with CrossRef.
It's great to see DataCite getting going and using CrossRef as a model for its development. There are a wide range of issues confronting data centers and repositories that host raw scientific data and datasets. These organizations are developing best practices and trying to get datasets to be treated in a similar way to research articles so that researchers get credit for them, they are discoverable, they are citeable and that they interlink with peer-reviewed scholarly articles.
