last week I introduced our basic search portal , today I want to highlight another feature, the DataCite content service.

The idea behind it is the following: Usually a DOI name is resolved to a landing page giving you all information about the content and the download link to it. Sometimes nevertheless it might be more interesting to resolve a DOI name of an object and get the metadata of the object back in return. Ideally in a machine-readable format.

This is what the content service allows! The service behind it was first implemented by CrossRef and it works directly on the level of the basic DOI resolution at http://dx.doi.org.

Using the accept header of the HTTP protocol it allows you to resolve a DataCite DOI and retirieve the metadata of this object in RDF format for example. On our webpage you will find more technical details of the system.

If you have curl installed on your computer you could test it in the following way:

curl -L -H “Accept: application/x-datacite+text” “http://dx.doi.org/10.5524/100005

would give you the citation of this dataset in text format:

Li, j; Zhang, G; Lambert, D; Wang, J (2011): Genomic data from Emperor penguin. GigaScience. http://dx.doi.org/10.5524/100005

with

curl -L -H “Accept: application/rdf+xml” http://dx.doi.org/10.5524/100005

you would retrieve this metadata as an RDF-file.

The content service works for all objects that have metadata in our metadata catalogue and we encourage you to play around with it and come up with some new ideas how to use it.

We are currently discussing the idea to allow something like the format application/raw to resolve a DOI name directly to the underlying data or in case of grey literature directly to the text.
Resolving DOI names directly to the data would provide an interesting way to allow persistent citation of queries results, by including the DOI name in the query itself.

You might have some other ideas. Share them with us, please.

Best,

Jan

2011 has been an exiting year. A lot has happened with DataCite and data citation in general. One year ago, I started this blog to keep you all updated. Today I am happy to present you the newest development:

The beta version of our DataCite search catalogue. You can find it at:
http://search.datacite.org

What is so special about it?

• We will store the metadata to every object that DataCite registers with a DOI there. Whether it is a dataset, a picture, an event or whatever.
• All metadata will follow the DataCite metadata scheme
• All metadata will be free under the CC0 license, giving you the right to use it for whatever you wish. And you can simply access it via our OAI interface

Currently we have around 800,000 records in there. Not all of them have metadata records yet, but it is progressing.

Interested in some use case examples?

• Well you can look at everything of course with the searchterm: *
• If you are interested what was uploaded in the last week try the searchterm: uploaded:[NOW-7DAY TO NOW]
• To find out which objects have relations of any kind to other objects, try the searchterm: relatedIdentifier:*
• If you are a publisher with DOI prefix 10.1055 for example, and you are interested, if your papers are related to our objects, try the searchterm: relatedIdentifier:*\:10.1055*
  

There are even some more nice features that I will tell you about in my next post. So much for now and enjoy playing with the catalogue.

Best,

Jan

I am very flattered by this and understand the award as not only an acknowledgment for my work, but for the work at the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB) and the whole idea of DataCite.
The award will be presented next Monday (September 26th) at the welcome reception of the International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries 2011 (TPDL) in Berlin. So I am looking forward to meet those of you who will attend the conference at the reception for a beer and a toast on DataCite.

Best,

Jan

today we put the slides from the summer meeting online. You can find them all on our
our DataCite webpage .

The reason for the delay is that I just returnded to Europe in the last days. After the summer meeting, I attended the 1st Word Data Service (WDS) conference in Kyoto, Japan.

The ICSU World Data System (WDS) builts on the 50 year experience of the world data centers. It is designed to be a quailty seal for data centers from every discipline but furthermore a platform for these centers to meet and exchange experience. Already over 100 data centers from various disciplines have applied to become member of the WDS.

DataCite and the WDS plan to develop close collaboration in the next years. The conference itself has been a great success and I look forward to their next developments.

Best,

Jan

Our meeting began with a fantastic keynote by John Wilbanks from Creative Commons. He gave us a motto for our path: We should keep in my mind that all our solutions have to be:

                        Simple. Weak. Scalable. Open

John’s slides can be found here , but I understand that he will upload a version with audio soon.

DataCite is about to become a community. A community to achieve data citation. It was great to see that so many different players were present to built this community here with us:

Data centers, Libraries, Publishers, Universities, Founding organisation and scientists.

Some statements amongst others that I will take home from the last days:

-         Abstracts to articles are open, it is time that the reference lists will be open too

-         We have to move from our current practise of “data sighting” to “data citing”

-         But even the ability to cite data might not be enough incentive for the scientists to publish their data. (“Waiving the carrot only makes sense to those who like carrots”)

-         One possibility could be establishing data papers as independent scientific items, There already are data journals out there: ESSD , G3 , and the upcoming GigaScienceJournal

-         The web once was invented for scholars, now it has changed everything except scholarly publication. It is time to end this.

-         Data is the real outcome of science, the article is only the summary or even mere metadata to the data.

-         Concerning the information overflow: We do not have to turn off the tabs, we have to build boats.

-         Great work has already been done, that we can all learn from and cooperate with at ICPSR , ORNL and PANGAEA for example.

-         What is publishing data anyway: Publishing with a small “p” (putting it online somehow) or with a big “P” (Quality controlled, peer-reviewed, persistent availability)

-         The difference between CrossRef and DataCite is the difference between communities. Those communities cooperate so do DataCite and CrossRef.

-         Concerning the issue, whether datasets and journals should be stored and maintained together: There already is a place for this and this place is the library.

It has been a great week. Full of great discussions and interesting thoughts.

A big thank you to all of those who have been here and enriched the discussions. We have received a great feedback by the community that also is a heavy mission for us. We will respect it. See you all next year in Copenhagen for the 2012 summer meeting.

The slides of the summer meeting will be up on the datacite webpage soon. You can find more summaries of the meeting on the web:

By Karthik Ram

By @mrgunn

By Carl Boettiger here and here

By GigaScience

Best,

Jan

• Addition of “URL” to list of allowed values for relatedIdentifierType.
• Addition of the following values to list of allowed values for contributorType: Producer, Distributor, RelatedPerson, Supervisor, Sponsor, Funder, RightsHolder.
• Addition of “SeriesInformation” to list of allowed values for descriptionType.
• Addition of “Model” to list of allowed values for resourceTypeGeneral.

Version 2.2 of the DataCite Metadata Schema documentation includes these changes:

• Provision of more examples of xml for different types of objects.
• Explanation of the PublicationYear property in consideration of the requirements of citation.
• A change to the definition of the Publication property, which now reads, “The name of the entity that holds, archives, publishes, prints, distributes, releases, issues, or produces the resource. This property will be used to formulate the citation, so consider the prominence of the role.”

The DOIs for the new version are:

Documentation: 10.5438/0005

XSD: 10.5438/0006

The Summer Meeting brings together people from research organisations, data centers, government, and information service providers to hear about the latest developments in data science, data citation, discovery, and reuse. It also provides opportunities to exchange experience and influence the next generation of data citation services.

This year’s program will include sessions on data citation, state of the art in data publishing and a discussion rounds on the new challenges that come with increasing access to scientific data. The keynote speaker is John Wilbanks, Vice President for Science of Creative Commons.

The 2010 DataCite summer meeting brought together a strong programme of speakers and participants . Highlights were published in a D-Lib special issue .

Why do I mention it here?
The BGI is a customer of DataCite using the British Library as their DOI-agency. Therefore the data of the genome’s sequence of the bacterium was published with a DOI name.

The data is available here:
doi:10.5524/100001

To maximise it’s utility to the research community and aid those fighting the current epidemic, genomic data
is released by BGI into the public domain under a CC0 licence.
Until the publication of research papers on the assembly and whole-genome analysis of this isolate
the dataset can be cited as:

Li, D; Xi, F; Zhao, M; Chen, W; Cao, S; Xu, R; Wang, G; Wang, J; Zhang, Z; Li, Y; Cui, C; Chang, C; Cui, C; Luo, Y; Qin, J; Li, S; Li, J; Peng, Y; Pu, F; Sun, Y; Chen, Y; Zong, Y; Ma, X; Yang, X; Cen, Z; Song, Y; Zhao, X; Chen, F; Yin, X; Rohde, H; Liang, Y; Li, Y
and the Escherichia coli O104:H4 TY-2482 isolate genome sequencing consortium (2011):
Genomic data from Escherichia coli O104:H4 isolate TY-2482.
BGI Shenzhen. doi:10.5524/100001
http://dx.doi.org/10.5524/100001

Best,

Jan

we have refurbished the DataCite Website.
The new version is easier to navigate and allows user to find the information they look for more directly. Please take your time and if you like, give us some feedback on it.

Furthermore we have scheduled the dates for our DataCite summer meeting! Following the great success of last years meeting in Hannover, Germany this years meeting will be on August 24. and 25. in Berkeley, California. The scope of the summer meeting is to:

• present the state-of-the-art in data related science
• give examples of projects and infrastructure
• provide a platform for data centers to exchange their experience
• give all DataCite members a platform to present their latest developments to a wide audience

Look out for more details on the agenda coming up soon.

Best wishes from Vancouver, where I am currently attending the IASSIST conference that has the motto: “Data Science Professionals: a Global Community of Sharing”, today we will present DataCite’S work and have a session about current practise of data citation, which is of course one of DataCite’s main subjects.

I will report about it next week.

Best,

Jan

we experienced technical issues with DataCite email accounts between February and March 2011, which may have resulted in undelivered messages. All technical issues have been resolved, but please let us know if you have contacted us in the past two months and have not yet received a response.

Sorry for that.

Oh and by the way: Next week we will have a new refurbished website out, that should be alittle easier in navigation and accessing information than the last one.

I will keep you informed.

Jan