2020 Strategic Priorities for Services and Infrastructure

In a blog post four weeks ago DataCite Executive Director Matt Buys talked about the DataCite strategic priorities for 2020 (Buys, 2020). In this post we want to talk a bit more about the strategic priorities for this year we have regarding services and infrastructure work: a) consolidation of our services and infrastructure, and b) stronger emphasis on member-driven product development. They are based on the clear message we heard from our members, e.g. in the member survey that we shared yesterday (Cousijn, 2020).

Consolidation of our services and infrastructure

The focus of development work over the past few years has been on upgrading existing DataCite infrastructure and building new services. With the relaunch of the OAI-PMH service in December 2019 (Hallett, 2019), we have now upgraded all major DataCite infrastructure that existed in 2015. For 2020, we want to spend more time consolidating our existing services and infrastructure, scaling back new service development, of course within the ramifications of what we promised to deliver in ongoing grants such as FREYA. The work planned includes

• Better monitoring and analytics of our services, e.g. better tracking of API performance
• Prioritize stability of our infrastructure, e.g. spending more time fixing bugs
• Consolidate the number of services available to our members, e.g. merging the public DataCite Search into the Fabrica service

Stronger emphasis on member-driven product development

This strategic priority includes two aspects: improving our process of feedback collection from DataCite members and how that informs our product development, and prioritizing our development efforts on new services or service improvements asked for by our members.

In 2020 we will improve the existing process of collecting input from our members regarding product development. These improvements will be based on how we currently collect member input via support emails, Open Hours, webinars and the DataCite General Assembly, other conversations with members, GitHub issues opened by members and users, and our public roadmap that allows comments and upvoting.

While continuing to improve the process of collecting feedback from members, there are a number of new services or service improvements that have been consistently asked for by our members, and that we will prioritize working on in 2020. This includes improvements of the DOI registration form in Fabrica to cover all optional metadata properties, a public dump of all DOI metadata available for download, improvements to the query interface for searching for DOIs, and better support for text documents in the metadata schema (e.g. support for journal name, volume, issue, and page numbers).

This blog post was originally published on the DataCite Blog.

References

Buys M. Vision 2020. Published online January 24, 2020. doi:10.5438/9J86-BV91

Cousijn H. Setting DataCites priorities: the 2019 member survey. Published online February 26, 2020. doi:10.5438/0X81-Y943

Hallett R. OAI-PMH Service Updates. doi:10.5438/PPTH-PZ62