DataCite
DataCite is a group of leading research libraries and technical information providers that established a partnership to improve access to research data on the Internet. The MoU was signed 2009-12-01 in the embassy of Germany in London.
Members:
- German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB)
- British Library
- Library of ETH Zurich
- French Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (INIST)
- Technical Information Center of Denmark
- Dutch TU Delft Library
- Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI)
- Australian National Data Service (ANDS)
- California Digital Library (CDL)
- Purdue University Libraries (PUL)
The goal of this cooperation is to establish a not-for-profit agency that enables organisations to register research datasets and assign persistent identifiers, so that research datasets can be handled as independent, citable, unique scientific objects (like crossref for data).
As a first step, this agency will build on an approach developed by TIB and promote the use of Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) for datasets.
DataCite is a result of the project "Publication and Citation of Scientific Primary Data" (STD-DOI), which was funded by the German Science Foundation (DFG).
Link and abstract
DataCite – International consortium for data citation (Jan Brase/TIB)
Access to research data is nowadays defined as part of the national responsibilities and in recent years most national science organisations have addressed the need to increase the awareness of, and the accessibility to, research data. Nevertheless science itself is international; scientists are involved in global unions and projects, they share their scientific information with colleagues all over the world, they use national as well as foreign information providers.
When facing the challenge of increasing access to research data, a possible approach should be global cooperation for data access via national representatives.
- a global cooperation, because scientists work globally, scientific data are created and accessed globally. - with national representatives, because most scientists are embedded in their national funding structures and research organisations .
DataCite was officially launched on December 1st 2009 in London and has 12 information institutions and libraries from 9 countries as members. By assigning DOI names to data sets, data becomes citable and can easily be linked to from scientific publications.
Data integration with text is an important aspect of scientific collaboration. DataCite takes global leadership for promoting the use of persistent identifiers for datasets, to satisfy the needs of scientists. Through its members, it establishs and promotes common methods, best practices, and guidance. The member organisations work independently with data centres and other holders of research data sets in their own domains. Based on the work of TIB as the first DOI-Registration Agency for data, DataCite has registered over 800,000 research objects with DOI names, thus starting to bridge the gap between data centers and publishers.
(Polar Libraries Conference 2010, Bremerhaven)