Supporting Data Citation: Experiences and Best Practices of a DOI Allocation Agency for Social Sciences

• Published in: Journal of librarianship and scholarly communication 2015-09, Vol.3 (2), p.1220
• Main Authors: Helbig, Kerstin, Hausstein, Brigitte, Toepfer, Ralf
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Economics; Information sharing; Research data management; Social sciences
• ISSN: 2162-3309; 2162-3309
• DOI: 10.7710/2162-3309.1220

INTRODUCTION As more and more research data becomes better and more easily available, data citation gains in importance. The management of research data has been high on the agenda in academia for more than five years. Nevertheless, not all data policies include data citation, and problems like versioning and granularity remain. SERVICE DESCRIPTION da|ra operates as an allocation agency for DataCite and offers the registration service for social and economic research data in Germany. The service is jointly run by GESIS and ZBW, thereby merging experiences on the fields of Social Sciences and Economics. The authors answer questions pertaining to the most frequent aspects of research data registration like versioning and granularity as well as recommend the use of persistent identifiers linked with enriched metadata at the landing page. NEXT STEPS The promotion of data sharing and the development of a citation culture among the scientific community are future challenges. Interoperability becomes increasingly important for publishers and infrastructure providers. The already existent heterogeneity of services demands solutions for better user guidance. Building information competence is an asset of libraries, which can and should be expanded to research data.