Based on recent discussions my sense is that our community will continue to thrash the issue of identifiers to death, repeating many of the debates that have gone on (and will go on) in other areas. To be trite, it seems to me we have three criteria: cheap , resolvable , and persistent . We get to pick two. Cheap and resolvable means URLs, which everybody is nervous about because they break.

Another incremental step has been achieved for the adoption of the practice of data citation; this week, Nature Biotechnology has included one of our dataset DOIs in their references for the first time.

Today marks the first day of the Chinese Lunar New Year, and as we enter the supposedly auspicious year of the Dragon now is a good opportunity to look towards developments in the nascent field of data publication over the upcoming year. This week marked important announcements of new and improved data publication platforms.

Is Data Publication the Right Metaphor? is an essay by Mark Parsons and Peter Fox to be published in the Data Science Journal, for which a preprint has been provided for open pre-publication community peer review at http://mp-datamatters.blogspot.com/2011/12/seeking-open-review-of-provocative-data.html.

This week marks another success for the fledgling practice of data citation, with two datasets from our GigaScience database published in Nature Biotechnology . The genomes sequenced by our colleagues at the BGI for the Cynomolgus and Chinese rhesus macaques were initially released DOIs at our launch in July, and were amongst the first (at the time) unpublished genomes released in this way.

Working at a data center as big as the BGI, and launching a journal focused on maximizing data use, we have followed the many calls over the years for improved incentives and methods to aid and reward scientists in spending the considerable time and effort to share their data.

Our busy summer on the road continues, with further globetrotting to meet authors and collaborators, get the message about GigaScience out, and hopefully at the end of it get some papers. This week Laurie and Scott will be at the Datacite meeting in Berkeley, meeting the people helping us to produce our data-DOIs, learning about where data-citation is going, and also doing a short presentation. As always check our twitter

In a recent blog post, Heather Piwowar, in discussing the advantages of citing datasets in the reference list of the article, said “No journals have standardized on this approach so far”. However, Pensoft Journals, a publisher that specializes in publishing biodiversity and biological systematics papers, and that has taken the lead in promoting the publication of datasets with DOIs, has exactly such a policy.

The DataCite Metadata Kernel version 2.0 [1] specifies the minimal metadata, and optional metadata, that should accompany a DataCite DOI for the identification of a published data entity. Within the Metadata Kernel document there is an XML mapping of these metadata terms, using DCMI Metadata Terms, and an example encoded in XML.