Working together to advance data evaluation: A look back at 2025

DOI: 10.60804/zae0-cy06

What if we could measure the reach and impact of open data? This question remains central to Make Data Count and has shaped our 2025 initiatives. Over the past year, we have worked on expanding the data-usage information available to the community and we championed practical ways to bring data into research evaluation. Here is a roundup of some of our milestones during 2025:

Expanding our view into data usage

This year, we pursued our work on the Data Citation Corpus. We expanded its coverage with two additional data sources, ASAP and Europe PMC, and collaborated with ISCPSR to include their citations for datasets in the social sciences in the Corpus. The last release of the Corpus aggregates 10 million citations, providing a valuable open resource of data citations for the community. 

To help expand the Data Citation Corpus so it reflects a wider share of the literature and the data usage within it, we launched the Kaggle competition 'Make Data Count – Finding Data References'. This global competition called for machine-learning models that could identify mentions of data in article text and classify how each dataset relates to the paper. The winning entries provided interesting approaches for the identification and classification of data use, and we are now assessing how these models can be put into practice to establish connections between articles and datasets at scale.

Beyond citations, we also advanced adoption of Make Data Count recommendations for tracking data views and downloads. We collaborated with the repositories in the Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative (GREI) to complete implementation of these recommendations. We also brought together information on data usage tracking and our recommendations into a dedicated page for repositories and data platforms.

Recognition for data

Make Data Count is participating in the current funding cycle of the SCOSS program, which has provided us with opportunities to engage more closely with other open infrastructures and with libraries and institutions. We thank the institutions who have generously supported Make Data Count this year.

We collaborated with HELIOS Open to host the 'Implementing data evaluation in academia' Working Group, which brought together data experts, librarians, and institutional representatives to develop resources for the implementation of data evaluation as part of institutional processes, in particular hiring, review, promotion, and tenure. The Working Group developed a resource toolkit for institutions, which includes a maturity model, an implementation guide, and a collection of case studies. These resources and more are available at our Resources for institutions page.

Looking ahead

Throughout 2025, we continued working closely with the community to advance practices in several additional areas. Early in 2026, we will share updates on the development of a typology of data uses, which we are co-leading with the FORCE11 'Data usage typologies' Working Group, and our contributions to the Open Science Monitoring Initiative to advance open science monitoring by scholarly content providers.

And of course, we look forward to continuing to strengthen the infrastructure and community collaboration that will make meaningful data evaluation not just possible, but an everyday part of the research ecosystem.