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STM, DataCite, and Crossref are pleased to announce an updated joint statement on research data.

In 2012, DataCite and STM drafted an initial joint statement on the linkability and citability of research data. With nearly 10 million data citations tracked, thousands of repositories adopting data citation best practices, thousands of journals adopting data policies, data availability statements and establishing persistent links between articles and datasets, and the introduction of data policies by an increasing number of funders, there has been significant progress since. It now seems appropriate to focus on providing updated recommendations for the various stakeholders involved in research data sharing.

Recording data citations supports data reuse and aids research integrity and reproducibility. Crossref makes it easy for our members to submit data citations to support the scholarly record.

TL;DR

Citations are essential/core metadata that all members should submit for all articles, conference proceedings, preprints, and books. Submitting data citations to Crossref has long been possible. And it’s easy, you just need to:

• Include data citations in the references section as you would for any other citation
• Include a DOI or other persistent identifier for the data if it is available - just as you would for any other citation
• Submit the references to Crossref through the content registration process as you would for any other record

And your data citations will flow through all the normal processes that Crossref applies to citations. And it will be distributed openly to the community (including DataCite!) via Crossref’s services and APIs. All data citations deposited with Crossref will be exposed in the (soon-to-be launched) Data Citation Corpus.

Crossref aims to link research together, making related items more findable, increasing transparency, and showing how ideas spread and develop. There are a number of moving parts in this effort: some related to capturing and storing linking information, others to making it available.

By including relationship metadata in Event Data, we are taking a big step to improve the visibility of a large number of links between metadata. We know this is long-promised and we’re pleased that making this valuable metadata available supports a number of important initiatives. We will also be backfilling, so all previously deposited relationships will eventually become available as events. The first step will be to add relationships between items that have DOIs, such as between a research article and a related review report or dataset.