From Sponsorship to Stewardship: In Conversation with DataCite

Photo by Jesse Bauer on Unsplash, chosen because the wild mushrooms and underlying mycelium network that acts as naturally connected infrastructure to connect plant roots and share food can also represent the relationships among the technical infrastructures discussed in this article.

PKP’s Famira Racy sits down with DataCite’s Director of Strategic Programs and Partnerships, Maria Gould, to discuss DataCite’s role in the research ecosystem, excitement around initiatives, impacts of the DataCite / PKP partnership, sustainability, and the future.

As a major sponsor of the PKP Warsaw Sprint, DataCite‘s support helped make possible 2 days of collaboration, innovation, and community building around open scholarly infrastructure. But DataCite’s contribution to the research ecosystem extends far beyond sponsorship. Through its work with persistent identifiers, metadata, and open, community-governed infrastructure, DataCite plays a key role in connecting research outputs, researchers, institutions, and services across the scholarly landscape.

In this conversation, we explore DataCite’s mission, its longstanding relationship with PKP, the importance of metadata and interoperability in scholarly communication, and the shared responsibility of sustaining the open infrastructure that research communities depend on. From sponsorship to stewardship, this conversation explores what it means not only to support open infrastructure, but to help sustain the communities that make it possible.

Spotlight on DataCite

For those in the PKP community who may know DataCite primarily as a DOI provider, how would you describe DataCite’s broader role in the research ecosystem, and what are some of the initiatives or challenges you’re most excited about right now?

DataCite was founded in 2009 by a group of research organizations that wanted to establish a shared infrastructure model to support greater visibility and discoverability of the broad range of research outputs that institutions create and steward.

DataCite DOI infrastructure provides the underlying mechanisms that make this possible, but our mission has always been about more than just registering identifiers – it’s about building a community of practice for research organizations around the world, and supporting open infrastructure and metadata that enables research to be more connected and impactful.

Today, nearly 17 years later, we’re still focused on the same goals and values. What’s a little different now is the broader scope of research activities that we support, the expansion of the DataCite member community across more organizations and regions, and the growing recognition of DataCite as a fundamental component of our increasingly interconnected global research ecosystem.

DataCite chose to support the PKP Warsaw Sprint as a major sponsor. What made this community and event important for DataCite to invest in, and what value do you see in bringing together infrastructure providers, developers, publishers, and researchers in this kind of collaborative environment?

DataCite and PKP have collaborated for many years, including through PKP’s participation in our Registered Service Providers program. We also both participate in similar community infrastructure initiatives such as SCOSS. Recently, we have been collaborating on the COMET initiative focused on community-driven metadata enrichment.

There are a few reasons why this moment seemed like a particularly important opportunity to deepen our collaborations. One reason is that we’re seeing more interest from our member community in using OJS for DataCite DOI registration, and we want to support the development of features and services that help these users follow best practices and contribute rich metadata to DataCite that can be discovered and used across different systems and services.

Another reason is that we know firsthand the importance of community collaboration and sharing knowledge around common infrastructure. Participating in the PKP Sprint was a way to contribute to these collective efforts.

From Partnership to Impact

DataCite and PKP have worked together to make DOI registration and metadata management more seamless within OJS. Looking back, what do you see as the most significant outcomes of that collaboration for journals, repositories, and researchers?

The 2026 PKP Warsaw Sprint was a great way to build on an existing foundation of collaboration and to look ahead to ways we can strengthen our partnership for the future. We’re looking forward to participating more actively in PKP community activities and supporting ongoing development work on OJS and beyond.

In terms of immediate outcomes and priorities, we’ll be looking at opportunities to improve metadata coming into DataCite from OJS. This means tracking where we are now with metadata quality and coverage, identifying where the gaps are, and determining how best to address them through development work on core code and plugins, and through outreach and training. These outcomes are significant for the community because they can ease the hard work of metadata management and maximize the benefits of rich open metadata on a global scale.

Interoperability as Infrastructure

Interoperability is essential but oftentimes overlooked. How does DataCite’s approach to persistent identifiers and metadata help PKP platforms connect with the wider scholarly ecosystem, including services like ORCID, repositories, and other PID providers?

DataCite has always functioned as a key metadata layer that connects the outputs and activities of global research organizations and makes this information openly available for discovery and reuse. We optimize interoperability in a number of ways, including through our community-developed metadata schema designed to support multiple types of outputs within a single, versatile structure, as well as crosswalks that support repositories in maintaining local metadata records in parallel.

Research organizations can easily connect their repository and publishing systems to DataCite through our APIs and UI, and leverage built-in connections to other persistent identifiers and downstream aggregation services.

Metadata Quality and Discoverability

Many publishers think of DOIs as identifiers, but DataCite emphasizes rich metadata and relationships between research objects. What opportunities do you see for PKP journals and presses to make better use of metadata to improve discovery, reuse, and research visibility?

DataCite’s metadata schema and the integration with OJS makes it possible for users to leverage key metadata properties and persistent identifiers to optimize discovery and reuse. This can include affiliation metadata, funding references, publisher details, and references and relationships to other works.

All of these connections and contextual information are openly available in the DataCite metadata store for users to easily retrieve and explore this information via our APIs and front-end interfaces. We also recently launched new metadata dashboards for DataCite members to monitor metadata quality and identify opportunities for improvement, and we provide documentation to support good metadata practices for discoverability and visibility.

Sustaining Community-owned Infrastructure

Both DataCite and PKP are community-governed organizations that provide open scholarly infrastructure. What lessons have you learned about building sustainable infrastructure that serves the research community while remaining open, transparent, and responsive to users?

The ability to build in the open and embed our work in community needs and values is a superpower. As a community-governed infrastructure organization, we’re always learning, ever evolving, and stronger together. Sustaining open infrastructure is a technical project, but it’s equally about people and community. It’s important to always acknowledge that!

Looking Ahead

If we were having this conversation five years from now, what would success look like for the relationship between DataCite, PKP, and the broader open infrastructure community?

First of all, I would hope and expect that our collaborations will be even more active five years from now! Second, it would be great if the future includes a growing number of PKP community members contributing metadata to DataCite, and leveraging DataCite services to support rich metadata and PID connections. Lastly, success for the broader community could mean we’re not talking as much about the importance of community-driven open infrastructure, because it’s just the norm!

Thank you Maria, for taking this time to share DataCite’s role in the scholarly publishing ecosystem, as well as its active role in supporting and sustaining open infrastructure. And thank you to DataCite for its contribution to the 2026 PKP Warsaw Sprint! It’s amazing to see what is possible when our communities come together to shape the future, and we look forward to continued collaborations!