Meeting with DataCite team from British Library
January 18, 2012 1 Comment
Last week, Elizabeth Newbold and Rachael Kotarski from British Library gave an interesting talk to Imperial on the DataCite. BL is now a member of DataCite and to provide the UK with DataCite infrastructure (know more click here). We had some heated discussions about the DOI issues, from what it is to how it actually fits our needs. We are considering whether it is possible to launch a pilot scheme on DataCite at Imperial following this project , and hopefully School of Public Health would be a start point…
Rapid Organization of Health Research Data 
Thanks for this post. This is very interesting and I am glad the DataCite presentation provoked such discussion. Perhaps you would not mind posting a blog about the consideration which led to such heated debate? I am sure all the project in the programme, and others, would find this interesting and useful.
There are some comments on researcher (lack of) awareness, or understanding of the benefits of using DOIs for data on the #smdmrd blog: http://rdm.c4dm.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/online-survey which observes that researchers in the C4DM ‘do not seem very much interested in DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers).’ The blog continues:
‘We suspect that one of the reasons for such a low response is that not everyone is familiar with DOIs. Also, because academic performance is measured on the base of paper citations, people prefer to refer to the paper describing the dataset, rather than to the dataset itself. This is an important aspect that needs to be address in a future phase, through training and promotion of data publication. On this point, see for example “Making the case for research data management” by the DCC (“…Datasets have yet to make a mark in research assessment terms compared with the traditional article. This is likely to change with evidence that making data related to an article publicly available correlates with higher citation rates, at least in fields that have built the necessary repositories, standards and collaborative culture.”)’
Does this tally with your findings? Or were there other issues at play which caused such heated discussion?
BTW, at part of the JISC Managing Research Data programme support, the British Library, in collaboration with the DCC, will be running a series of workshops on DataCite over the next 15 months or so. Announcements to follow.
Best,
Simon.