[Taxacom] Showing the importance of natural history collections and the networks they are building

[Shorthouse, David]

All,

We (Canadensys) have been assigning DataCite DOIs to occurrence and
checklist datasets in our Integrated Publishing Toolkit though an
agreement with DataCite Canada (eg
http://dx.doi.org/10.5886/998dbs2a). DataCite's recommendation to
handle versioning is to mint new DOIs and use its metadata schema to
point to previous versions of published datasets. Though they are
DOIs, they are not CrossRef DOIs. In other words, even if they were
cited in the primary literature (CrossRef's ballpark), I have not
(yet) seen any evidence of functional connections between CrossRef &
DataCite for the service we all want: "show me papers that have cited
my dataset". DataCite and CrossRef need to share each others' data
hopefully without drastic changes to the metadata schema depositors
must adhere to. I would love to have a box on the Canadensys IPT
equivalent to CrossRef's Cited-By Linking that would link out to
papers that have cited hosted datasets. This is obviously a common
request so I have every expectation that CrossRef and DataCite will
get it right. Heavy-hitting organizations like Dryad also mint their
DOIs via DataCite.

David P. Shorthouse
Biodiversity Informatics Manager, Canadensys
http://www.canadensys.net

On Thu, Apr 24, 2014 at 3:19 PM, Roderic Page
<Roderic.Page at glasgow.ac.uk> wrote:
> Surely we can learn from past mistakes and do this properly. Citations are meaningless unless they are counted, and the way to do this efficiently is with identifiers such as DOIs, not developing some arbitrary way of citing databases or datasets. Mint DOIs for collections, mint DOIs for datasets (GBIF is heading down this route), make data a first class citizen by making it trivially easy to cite. Don't moan about people not citing data if you haven't made it easy for them to do so. If you value your data, make it easy to cite - give it a DOI.
>
> Regards
>
> Rod