DataCite au service des données scientifiques - identifier pour valoriser

Research data, in various forms, are increasingly being integrated into scientific and technical information services, mainly – but not only – as complementary material to publications based on these data. Online availability of non-textual digital resources is broadening, but must go along with standards of interoperability, common metadata formats, and options of linking content of different types in a normalized way. The international DataCite consortium, in which Inist-CNRS represents France, aims to foster and accelerate these developments. It has a specific role of “DOI (Digital Object Identifier) registration agency”, considering the DOI, already well-established in the world of publishing, as an efficient tool for persistently identifying data, in order to facilitate discovery, access and citation. DataCite has created its own metadata scheme and has developed tools and services aiming to improve data sharing and reuse. Such added value is seen as a contribution to realizing the full benefit and potential of open data. By promoting data citation, DataCite also wants to achieve a key objective to improve conditions for providing appropriate credit and giving greater recognition to all kind of scientific work around data. The specific topic of data citation has recently been subject of various international initiatives aiming to harmonize existing practices and make recommendations. They have recently converged, through the Data Citation Synthesis Group, into a list of general principles which are about to be broadly accepted by the communities. In this context, publishers will have to adapt and clearly define their policies in terms of linking publications and underlying data. DataCite’s actions and services have to be seen within the larger picture of international movements that address research data management practices and use of persistent identifiers: Research Data Alliance, WDS-ICSU, CODATA, EPIC, Data Citation Index, etc. Another important example is the ODIN European project, where DataCite and the ORCID initiative, together with other partners, want to create foundations for services connecting different identifier types.