DataCite Use Cases Around the World: The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), Nepal

Sudip Pradhan:
The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) is a regional intergovernmental learning and knowledge-sharing centre serving the eight regional member countries of the Hindu Kush Himalaya region (HKH) – Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Myanmar, Nepal, and Pakistan. Our mission is to build and share knowledge that drives regional policy and action and attracts investment that enables the diverse countries and communities of the HKH region to transition to greener, more inclusive, and climate-resilient development. ICIMOD has a data policy which aligns with the philosophy of open data. Our data comes with a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY 4.0) license. We joined DataCite so that we can generate DOIs for datasets, and users can in turn cite our data.

Data availability and reuse are crucial in addressing global challenges like climate change, as they allow researchers to build upon existing knowledge and develop innovative solutions more efficiently. DataCite's services, particularly adopting DOIs for datasets and other research outputs, facilitate transparency, reproducibility, and accessibility—key factors in advancing climate research and policy-making.

Sudip Pradhan:
We use GeoNetwork as a metadata management system at ICIMOD which can be searched and viewed on our Regional Database System (RDS) Portal. We fill in the required metadata information and generate DOIs currently using DataCite Fabrica when we publish our data on the RDS Portal.

Sudip Pradhan:
The DOI of a given dataset corresponds to the metadata page of that dataset in our RDS Portal. When we make a dataset public (i.e. downloadable) on our RDS Portal, we use its relevant metadata information (stored in our GeoNetwork) to create DOI on DataCite Fabrica. Once we generate DOI, we also incorporate the data citation information into our metadata.

Sudip Pradhan:
We did not face any challenges as such. Initially, when we joined DataCite we had many datasets to be registered and we used Python scripts to integrate with the DataCite REST API which helped to automate the creation of the DOIs. These days we primarily use Fabrica since we create DOIs for one dataset at a time and the DataCite Fabrica interface serves the purpose.

Sudip Pradhan:
We organize from time to time orientation programs for our new staff on our Regional Database System including the concept of metadata. Our staff need to fill in metadata for the datasets they develop using an Excel template and we have a tool in place to ingest that information in our GeoNetwork. The same information is used for generating DOIs. 

Sudip Pradhan:
In addition to writing papers on our work, our colleagues are also able to provide DOIs for the datasets that they produce. In certain journals, it is also required to provide DOI for datasets and DataCite has helped us greatly in this regard. This also means that our researchers get more recognition for their datasets, and they are now aligned with scholarly publishers’ data-sharing policies.

Sudip Pradhan:
Joining DataCite and generating DOIs for our datasets is a great step we took a few years back and my advice to other institutions would be to go for it. It is quite easy to adopt and use DataCite services and infrastructure.