CrossRef and DataCite collaborate on DOIs

CrossRef and DataCite have launched an initiative to accelerate the adoption of digital object identifiers (DOIs) for data publication and citation.

Together, the two organisations have registered almost 75 million DOIs. Data are essential building blocks of scholarship and research in the sciences, medicine, technology, social sciences, and humanities. DataCite and CrossRef say they will work together to ensure that researchers can seamlessly navigate among all research results, including articles and data – and to make data a 'first-class, identifiable, referenceable, and citable element in the scholarly record'.

DataCite and CrossRef have agreed to collaborate to:

• Enhance the interoperability of their respective systems in order to make it easier for publishers, data centres, libraries and third parties to integrate with the scholarly DOI ecosystem;
• Provide comprehensive support for interlinking between articles and data;
• Develop open APIs and open source tools to surface citations and other relationships between publications and data sets;
• Integrate into their services other existing scholarly communications initiatives such as ORCID and CrossRef's FundRef; and
• Develop systems, workflows and best practices for using DOIs to reference large, highly granular and dynamic data.

Geoffrey Bilder, CrossRef's director of strategic initiatives, said: 'Nobody in the scholarly communications community can have failed to notice the surge in interest in data publication and the widespread desire to link publications to their underlying data. About once a month we are invited to participate in yet another conference, workshop or initiative to address the issues around data and data citation. This is a fast-moving area, and in order to meet the needs of researchers and our respective memberships, we need to make sure that CrossRef and DataCite are working together closely, quickly and efficiently.'

Adam Farquhar, president of DataCite, added: 'Collectively, DataCite and CrossRef manage nearly 75 million DOIs that identify critical research objects in the scholarly record. It is vital to the DOI ecosystem to ensure our systems are interoperable and that we make the most efficient use of our resources through collaboration and sharing. This is particularly true as we try to meet the requirements raised in the fast-moving community that is focused on data publication, citation, and reuse.'