Expanding Access to DataCite Metadata: New Public and Monthly Data Files Now Available

DataCite brings together descriptive metadata for millions of research outputs, resources, and activities, serving systems across the world that rely on DataCite for high-quality metadata to put research in context and enable downstream discovery, reuse, and impact. As a vital source of open data and a foundational infrastructure provider, we are committed to making DataCite metadata as open and as usable as possible. In line with that objective, we are excited to release our latest annual public data file and also announce the launch of a new monthly data file service.

2025 Public Data File

Our latest public data file, which we release on an annual basis, is now available for 2025. In 2025, the DataCite community registered over 36 million DOIs, and the DataCite metadata store surpassed 100 million total DOIs during the year. DataCite Members also updated over 23 million existing DOIs, working collaboratively to improve metadata quality through richer description, connections to other persistent identifiers, and relationships across outputs and activities.

The new public data file contains metadata for 108 million DataCite DOIs in Findable state that were registered up to the end of 2025. This data file follows the same structure as our previous public data file, as described in our support documentation. 

You can get a link to download the public data file via our data files portal.

New Monthly Data File Service

To facilitate more frequent metadata harvesting, we're launching a new monthly data file service. Each month, we'll release a new data file containing metadata for all DataCite DOIs. Users can conveniently access the latest updates to DataCite metadata, making it easier for metadata harvesters to identify DOIs that have been recently created or updated. The monthly snapshot is currently available to all DataCite Members and Consortium Organizations, who can use their existing member, consortium organization, or repository credentials to authenticate and download the file.

You can read more about working with the monthly data file in our support documentation.

More Ways to Explore DataCite Metadata

In addition to the public data file and monthly data file, we continue to support many ways to explore and work with DataCite metadata. Our REST API supports real-time access to metadata for discovery and integration into systems and workflows. DataCite Commons offers an interface for exploring metadata connections, making it easier to understand the relationships between works, people, organizations, and repositories.

We also work closely with a growing ecosystem of metadata harvesters and aggregators that reuse DataCite metadata to power downstream services. You can find an overview of these metadata harvesters on our website, highlighting how DataCite metadata is reused across the scholarly infrastructure. 

We are continuing to develop harvesting-related features and want to hear from you about future enhancements you would like to see. Join the DataCite Harvesters Interest Group to stay tuned about the latest developments—everyone is also welcome at our next DataCite Harvesters Interest Group Meeting on 28 January 2026.