The University of California (UC)’s California Digital Library (CDL) has announced that it has become a founding member of the international DataCite consortium. DataCite is a group of academic and scientific memory institutions providing data publishing opportunities for researchers lacking appropriate publication channels and incentives for their datasets.
It has been observed that providing long-term access to datasets is an important priority for academic scholarship and research. Data are now seen as the building blocks of scholarship and research in the sciences and humanities. Scholars and archivists are reportedly recognising the potential for increasing collaboration and synthesis when data are archived, published and shared, forging the possibility for new discoveries built upon the research of others.
DataCite seeks to offer an easy way to connect an article published in a scholarly journal with the underlying data and allow authors to take control of the management and distribution of their research. Additionally, DataCite provides the means for researchers to share and get credit for datasets; establish easier access to research data; increase acceptance of research data as legitimate, citable contributions to the scholarly record; and to support data archiving that permits results to be verified and re-purposed for future study.
According to DataCite, a pragmatic first step towards managing data is to register the existence of datasets publicly and permanently. Its services seek to make it easy for data producers to obtain permanent catalogue records and persistent identifiers that are visible through familiar mechanisms, such as library systems, CrossRef and search engines.
Within the CDL, responsibility for DataCite activities rests with the UC Curation Center. The Center aims to support scholars by providing methods for them to locate, identify, archive, publish and cite research datasets with confidence.
In addition to the CDL, the DataCite consortium includes the German National Library of Science and Technology, the British Library, the Library of the ETH Zurich, the French Institute for Scientific and Technical Information, the Technical Information Center of Denmark, the Dutch TU Delft Library, Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information, the Australian National Data Service and Purdue University.
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