It has been ten years since the release of the first DataCite metadata schema. Many improvements since then provide a roadmap for community evolution toward making DataCite metadata more FAIR.

The road to complete and consistent metadata can be long and arduous – digging through piles of metadata and other kinds of data to find small gems of information that can be added to metadata records, contacting recalcitrant researchers to fill in blanks, slowly building content across a collection… Does it really need to be that hard?

Looking for New Year’s metadata resolutions? How about: Stop using sentences that include the words “minimum metadata” without specifying a use case. Sentences that include the words “minimum metadata” come up frequently in metadata discussions, usually in the context of what a data provider wants to provide or, even more common, in the context of what should be expected of them.

DataCite subject metadata can play an important role in dataset classification and discovery, but these elements are uncommon in the repository and need some improvements. Establishing metrics for completeness and quality is an important first step in the improvement process.

Non-unique organizations and acronyms can cause problems in ROR searches. Use supporting information if you have it to get better results. If not, beware of theses gotchas.

Let’s recognize leaders in the adoption of organizational identifiers in DataCite metadata. They are making tracks for us to follow!

Adopting organizational identifiers (RORs) in existing metadata may not be as hard as we think for DataCite members that only have a few affiliations in their metadata. However, even in these cases, some challenges remain.

Many groups are interested in augmenting their affiliation metadata with RORs and it seems that a list of organization names is the right input to that process... Alas, we know that affiliations are a swamp filled with gotcha's. It turns out that an unexpected (really?) number of organization names resolve to multiple RORs. Actually, almost 800 of them!

Clear and specific community recommendations for FAIR metadata in multiple dialects are rare and necessary for measuring progress towards evaluating and improving metadata in many repositories. We propose an initial set of concepts and an evaluation of the DataCite metadata collection for essential metadata elements that support Findability.

Join the community playing The Metadata Game!