Make Data Count: A Central Corpus for All Data Citations

To articulate the value proposition and justify open science as a norm in the research community, it is necessary to assess the impact and reach of investments made in open research data. The Make Data Count (MDC) initiative began in 2014 with the goal of creating the infrastructure for open data metrics.

While different communities have yet to agree on the appropriate indicators for assessing the reach and impact of diverse research data, it is clear that standardizing and quantifying data citations is a necessary first step.

Despite a growing emphasis on data citation among research stakeholders over the last five years, data citation initiatives have yet to be successful.

In order to expose data citations in a reusable manner, DataCite proposes to shift focus away from relying on publisher workflows, utilizing text scraping methodologies and expanding scope beyond DOIs, developing an open data citation corpus, storing asserted data citations from a diverse set of sources.

Driving the MDC initiative forward, this corpus will serve as a trusted and aggregated CC0 source of data citations from traditional workflows (Crossref), full text scraping algorithms (Meta), and biomedical/life sciences repositories (EMBL-EBI).