The connections between scholarly resources generated by persistent identifiers (PIDs) and associated metadata form a graph: the PID Graph [Fenner & Aryani (2019)]. We developed this PID Graph concept in the EC-funded FREYA project, and have identified important use cases and technical requirements. In May, DataCite introduced a GraphQL API to standardize and simplify how users can contribute to and consume the PID Graph [Fenner (2019b)].

Two weeks ago DataCite announced the pre-release version of a GraphQL API [Fenner (2019)]. GraphQL simplifies complex queries that for example want to retrieve information about the authors, funding and data citations for a dataset with a DataCite DOI. These connections together form the PID Graph [Fenner &

Persistent identifiers (PIDs) are not only important to uniquely identify a publication, dataset, or person, but the metadata for these persistent identifiers can provide unambiguous linking between persistent identifiers of the same type, e.g. journal articles citing other journal articles, or of different types, e.g. linking a researcher and the datasets they produced.

We know that software is important in research, and some of us in the scholarly communications community, for example, in FORCE11, have been pushing the concept of software citation as a method to allow software developers and maintainers to get academic credit for their work: software releases are published and assigned DOIs, and software users then cite these releases when they publish research that uses the software.

Three weeks ago we started assigning DOIs to every post on this blog (Fenner, 2016c). The process we implemented uses a new command line utility and integrates well with our the publishing workflow, with (almost) no extra effort compared to how we published blog posts before. Given that DataCite is a DOI registration agency, we obviously are careful about following best practices for assigning DOIs.

On Tuesday the journal PLOS ONE celebrated its 10th anniversary (see blog post by PLOS ONE Editor-in-Chief Jörg Heber and blog post by PLOS ONE Managing Editor Iratxe Puebla and PLOS Advocacy Director Catriona MacCallum). PLOS ONE (and PLOS) have changed scholarly publishing in many ways, from a DataCite perspective probably most importantly via the data policy updated in February 2014 that states that PLOS ONE was not the first journal with a

Eating your own dog food is a slang term to describe that an organization should itself use the products and services it provides. For DataCite this means that we should use DOIs with appropriate metadata and strategies for long-term preservation for the scholarly outputs we produce.

Geoff Bilder from CrossRef likes to show the following slide at scholarly conferences, and then asks the audience what they see: Most of us probably immediately recognize this document as a scholarly article.

In 1998 Tim Berners-Lee coined the term cool URIs (1998), that is URIs that don’t change. We know that URLs referenced in the scholarly literature are often not cool, leading to link rot (Klein et al., 2014) and making it hard or impossible to find the referenced resource.

CSV in many ways is for data what Markdown is for text documents: a very simple format that is both human- and machine-readable, and that – despite a number of shortcomings - is widely used. Given the popularity of Markdown for writing blog posts, using CSV to publish blog posts with tabular data should be an obvious thing to do, and we have just published our first blog post using CSV data.