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.

Data citation is core to DataCite's mission and DataCite is involved in several projects that try to facilitate data citation, including THOR, Data Citation Implementation Pilot (DCIP), Research Data Alliance (RDA), and COPDESS. The biggest roadblock for wider data citation adoption might be insufficient incentives for individual researchers, but another major challenge is that implementing data citation is still too complicated.

This week some of us from DataCite are attending CSVconf in Berlin, and we are a conference sponsor and co-organizer. One important reason we are at CSVconf is that providing persistent identifiers and starndard metadata for research data, which in most cases are stored in tabular data formats such as CSV, is central to what DataCite is doing.

In a guest post two weeks ago Elizabeth Hull explained that only 6% of Dryad datasets associated with a journal article are found in the reference list of that article, data she also presented at the IDCC conference in February (Mayo, Hull, & Vision, 2015). This number has increased from 4% to 8% between 2011-2014, but is still low.

When I started as DataCite Technical Director four months ago, my first post (Fenner, 2015) on this blog was about what I called Data-Driven Development . The post included a lot of ideas on how to approach development and technical infrastructure. In this post I want to take a second look.

This Monday ORCID, CrossRef and DataCite announced (ORCID post, CrossRef post, DataCite post) the new auto-update service that automatically pushes metadata to ORCID when an ORCID identifier is found in newly registered DOI names. This is the first joint announcement by the three organizations, and shows the close collaboration between ORCID, CrossRef and DataCite.

This blog post provides more detail for a short presentation I will give today at the Software Credit Workshop in London.

The Force11 Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles (Data Citation Synthesis Group, 2014) highlight the importance of giving scholarly credit to all contributors: The EC-funded THOR project that DataCite is involved in addresses these issues, and I have summarized the findings of one of our first reports in a previous blog post.

One of the first tasks for DataCite in the European Commission-funded THOR project, which started in June, was to contribute to a comparison of the ORCID and DataCite metadata standards.