We were out in Force

This week most of the DataCite staff is attending the Force16 conference in Portland, Oregon. Force16 brings together a large group of people who either already work with DataCite in one way or another, or are doing interesting projects of relevance to DataCite.

ImpactStory is a non-profit that helps scientists learn where their research is being cited, shared, saved and more. Ten days ago ImpactStory launched a new version that is built all around ORCID IDs and DOIs. Both the data and the software running the service are open, and the new version integrates naturally with the ORCID/DOI integrations that DataCite is working on as part of the THOR project. The ImpactStory co-founders Jason Priem and Heather Piwowar are both attending Force16 and we had a great conversation on how the new ImpactStory could be integrated with what DataCite is doing.

GitHub is a popular repository for software source code, and GitHub staff member Arfon Smith is at Force16 as co-chair of the Force11 Software Citation Working Group. In the past two years we have seen an increasing number of DOIs (currently about 7,200) minted for archived versions of GitHub software releases, deposited mainly in the Zenodo repository. Just as we want to use DOIs to make it easier for software to become part of the scholarly record, we want to link GitHub and ORCID accounts to facilitate the recognition of scientific software engineers in the current scholarly ecosystem.

The latest version of the DataCite Profiles service released today has added support for ImpactStory and GitHub. If you have an orcid with publications in it you can see a summary from ImpactStory in DataCite Profiles, and a direct link will send you to your ImpactStory profile page. You can now link your GitHub account via OAuth authentication, linking the ORCID identifier used by DataCite Profiles with the GitHub username.

To try out this new functionality, go to the DataCite Profiles service, and then after login to your Settings. And sign up with Impactstory and GitHub if you haven't done so already.

This blog post was originally published on the DataCite Blog.