First it was a river. Then it was a bookstore. Then it sold power drills and pen refills. Now it’s a movie studio inviting one and all to submit scripts and videos?

As a provider of crucial scholarly infrastructure, it is critical that DataCite not only provides a reliable service, but also properly communicates problems. The best way to do this is via a central status page, a best practice used by many organizations from Github and Diqus to Slack.

The DataCite blog has migrated to a new platform, from a hosted version at Ghost to a self-hosted version using Jekyll. The main reason for this change is that it gives us more control over the formatting of blog posts. The migration was easy as both Ghost and Jekyll use markdown to format blog posts, and the blog post URLs haven't changed.

DataCite Labs today is launching the DataCite Profiles service, a central place for users to sign in with DataCite, using their ORCID credentials. The first version of DataCite Profiles focusses on integration with ORCID via the Search & Link and Auto-Update services, described in a previous blog post.

We will follow up with a blog post later this week explaining the DataCite auto-update implementation. Since ORCID’s inception, our key goal has been to unambiguously identify researchers and provide tools to automate the connection between researchers and their creative works. We are taking a big step towards achieving this goal today, with the launch of Auto-Update functionality in collaboration with Crossref and DataCite.

Three years ago today Open Researcher & Contributor ID (ORCID) launched its service at the Outreach Meeting in Berlin. One of many tweets from the launch day: Executive Director Laure Haak was written a nice blog post summarizing the achievements in the past few years, going from 0 to 1.7 million registered users, 400 members, and a staff of 20. Congratulations!

Citylibresearchcasestudies Dr Ernesto Priego, Course Director of #citylis PG scheme, Department of Library & Information Science, City University London. Current research interest: Library & Information Science . Other related research interest include: comics scholarship, digital humanities, open access publishing, research data management, scholarly communications.

We launched this blog six weeks ago on a hosted version of Ghost, the open source blogging platform. Ghost doesn't have all the features of Wordpress or other more mature blogging platforms, but it is a pleasure to use. The other alternative would have been to put the blog up on the Drupal-based main DataCite website, but Drupal is really a content-management system and usually not the best choice for a serious blog.

Last week Jennifer Lin shared information on the Making Data Count (MDC) project on this blog. MDC is a project funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) to design and develop metrics that track and measure data use – data-level metrics (DLM). Funding for the 12 month project ends October 1st, with a no-cost extension until March 1st.

Today I am pleased to announce the launch of a new service, DataCite Labs Search – the service is available immediately at https://search.datacite.org/. This is one of THOR’s first services and is based on work in the earlier EC-funded ODIN Project. The ODIN project launched the DataCite/ORCID claiming tool in June 2013. The DataCite/ORCID claiming tool allows users to add works from the DataCite Metadata Store (MDS) to their ORCID profile.