Scaling for Impact: How NIFS and DataCite Are Advancing Global Discoverability of Japanese Research

The National Institute for Fusion Science (NIFS) is an inter-university research institute based in Japan. NIFS promotes academic collaborative research and also strives to meet the expectations of the industrial sector, which is beginning to engage with fusion energy development, as well as students, including those pursuing recurrent education. To achieve this, NIFS aims to maximize and expand its knowledge base and research infrastructure, with the goal of becoming firmly established as a unique global platform.

In 2024, NIFS became a DataCite Member with an ambitious goal to register over 40 million DOIs within two years, covering decades of research activity. From the outset, the collaboration between NIFS and DataCite was built on a shared vision to make Japanese research more visible, citable, and connected through persistent identifiers and rich metadata.

To achieve this, NIFS and DataCite worked closely to address the technical challenges of registering DOIs at this scale. While DataCite typically registers around one million DOIs per month, NIFS aimed to register 10 million DOIs within just a few weeks. Meeting this challenge required DataCite to enhance ingestion workflows, expand infrastructure capacity, and optimize APIs and front-end interfaces for high-volume data handling. 

At the end of last year, NIFS had successfully registered 10 million DOIs in six weeks. This impact was highlighted at a NINS press conference in early 2025. As of today, NIFS has now registered about 20 million DOIs, making it DataCite's largest metadata contributor to date.

This achievement is notable beyond the scale of the DOI registrations themselves. NIFS is also contributing rich, structured metadata, enabling improved discovery and analysis of research outputs and setting an inspiring example for others to follow.

NIFS and DataCite are excited to continue this journey in 2025. As NIFS embarks on additional DOI registrations to achieve full coverage and discoverability of its research activities, DataCite will continue to optimize infrastructure scaling and service support for this as well as for other research organizations who would like to register DOIs at scale.