DataCite Annual Member Survey 2024

As a community-driven organization, we engage community inputs in multiple ways, and one of those ways is our annual member survey. In the final months of 2024, we reached out to ask for your ideas and feedback through a survey designed to help us understand more about what works well at DataCite, what could be improved, and what you would like to see more of. These contributions from our community are essential in guiding the vision and direction of DataCite throughout 2025.

General

Almost 25% of DataCite Members participated in the 2024 survey, an increase from 17% in 2023. The respondents once again reflected a diverse representation across:

• Geographic regions: All regions were represented, with Europe and North America each contributing just over 40% of responses—together accounting for more than 80% of the total.
• Membership tenure: Both new and long-standing members participated.
• Member types: All categories were represented, with 45% being Direct Members (up from 40.5% in 2023).

Encouragingly, over 90% of respondents would recommend DataCite to other organizations, giving a rating of 8–10 out of 10, where 10 signifies "extremely likely" to recommend. The overall average rating continued its upward trend for the fifth consecutive year, reaching nearly 9.

When asked what does DataCite do well, the three main areas that member responses fell into were:

1. Technical Expertise and Support
2. DOI Services and Infrastructure
3. Communication

These areas were similar to 2023. One notable difference from the 2023 survey, was that responses this time were much more evenly distributed throughout the identified categories, indicating that members are satisfied across all areas.

Looking into the response more carefully, members appreciate that our tools and services—such as Fabrica—are intuitive and built on reliable infrastructure, that our support is responsive and effective to community needs, and that we offer opportunities to learn.

Regarding what we can improve on, the largest response at over 28% (an 8% increase on 2023) was "nothing." Beyond this, responses were reasonably evenly split, with the top three areas mentioned as:

• Documentation and Communication
• Technical Support and Platform Development
• Training and Education

We are taking note of all of the specific comments given by you in these areas and others, and will continue to enhance our services in 2025 to match the needs of our diverse community.

Tool and Services

Focusing even more on our tools and services, we narrowed down the section on them in the 2024 annual survey to four main questions: how often you use DataCite tools and services, what you use them for, your satisfaction with them, and areas of product development that will ensure they continue to support your evolving use cases.

Over 75% of respondents use our tools and services at least a few times per month, with more than 80% giving a rating of 8–10 out of 10 (with 10 being "very satisfied") for their satisfaction with the tools and services they used in 2024. The overall average rating was 8.44, a large increase on the average of 7.66 in 2023 and highlighting our work over the past year to improve our tools and services following previous member feedback.

Correspondingly, the three tasks respondents predominately use DataCite services for are:

• Registering DOIs
• Maintaining and updating metadata
• Analyzing metadata

"Other" responses here were mostly from DataCite Consortium Leads, who create and manage accounts for their Consortium Organizations.

We also asked about your use cases and any new features or enhancements to our tools and services that would support these. The biggest response at 34.4% was that you do not require any new features or enhancements.

For members who do want additional features/enhancements, most would like to see metadata enhancements. Requests in this area include integrating long-term preservation information, adapting schemas for different resource types, enhancing citation tracking, and improving metadata precision and completeness. Increased functionality in tools such as DataCite Fabrica and Commons, better interoperability with standards, and expanded API capabilities were also highlighted. Again, we will examine all of the requests carefully and prioritize our roadmap accordingly.

Support & Training 

The positive upward trends seen above are also reflected in your experiences of our support services and documentation. The vast majority of members use both the DataCite Support Desk and our Support pages (and training) at least a few times per year, and satisfaction with them has once again increased. Over 80% of respondents are satisfied (giving a rating of 8–10 out of 10) with our support desk and over 70% with our support documentation and training. Average ratings now stand at 8.99 and 8.40, respectively  (up from 8.80 and 8.10 in 2023). 

Finally, when asked what information you need about our services and whether you have any specific comments about our support desk/documentation/training, the most common answer was "nothing" in both cases. Beyond this, members want to know general information, about our technical documentation, and about our training. We are grateful for all of the other comments we received and for the many kind words praising our support services.

Concluding Remarks

Many thanks to everyone who spent time completing the survey and providing us with their opinions and feedback. DataCite is community owned and sustained, and your views are vital to guiding our current and future priorities.

While we are pleased that many members are happy with DataCite services, we also realize that there is always room for improvement and that some of our members have specific needs they still want us to address. We will therefore strive to keep enhancing our services, and make certain that we remain valuable and relevant to you.

If you have any questions or ideas you would like to share with us, feel free to contact us at support@datacite.org.