Helena Cousijn

The official countdown to PIDapalooza 2020 begins here! It’s 163 days to go till our flame-lighting opening ceremony at the fabulous Belem Cultural Center in Lisbon, Portugal. Your friendly neighborhood PIDapalooza Planning Committee—Helena Cousijn (DataCite), Maria Gould (CDL), Stephanie Harley (ORCID), Alice Meadows (ORCID), and I—are already hard at work making sure it’s the best one so far!

As self-confessed PID nerds, we’re big fans of a persistent identifier. However, we’re also conscious that the uptake and use of PIDs isn’t a done deal, and there are things that challenge how broadly these are adopted by the community. At PIDapalooza (an annual festival of PIDs) in January, ORCID, DataCite and Crossref ran an interactive session to chat about the cool things that PIDs allow us to do, what’s working well and, just as importantly, what isn’t, so that we can find ways to improve and approaches that work.

We’ve mentioned why data citation is important to the research community. Now it’s time to roll up our sleeves and get into the ‘how’. This part is important, as citing data in a standard way helps those citations be recognised, tracked, and used in a host of different services.

A couple of weeks ago we shared with you that data citation is here, and that you can start doing data citation today. But why would you want to? There are always so many priorities, why should this be at the top of the list?

Data citation is seen as one of the most important ways to establish data as a first-class scientific output. At Crossref and DataCite we are seeing growth in journal articles and other record types citing data, and datasets making the link the other way. Our organizations are committed to working together to help realize the data citation community’s ambition, so we’re embarking on a dedicated effort to get things moving.