DataCite's new Membership Model and new Fees Structure will come into effect on January 1st 2021. For customers outside ETH Zurich, this is quite a big change. They will get a new contract and will need to agree to DataCite’s terms and conditions. Due to the new membership model, some organizations who have been registering with us for a long time, will leave by the end of the year to become DataCite members themselves. The model also implies financial changes. In the future, DataCite and not the DOI Desk will set the fees. Moreover, as DataCite is a community and needs to be sustainable in the long run, DataCite will increase their fees. For our small customers, who only register a handful of DOIs yearly, we are working on a plan on how to keep them going without a big financial burden. We are going to talk to customers concerned individually.

Due to DataCite offering a REST API for DOI registration and to the fact that our own DOI system is reaching its end-of-life, it was unclear if we would continue to offer OAI-PMH harvesting in the future. However, as many DOI customers both within ETH Zurich and externally rely on this service, and because DataCite is not offering it, we decided to renew our current DOI system. Therefore, it will still be possible to register DOIs via OAI-PMH in Dublin Core. Until the new system is ready, we offer this service just for existing customers, afterwards for everyone. The reason for this is the limited capacity of the current system. If you are planning on registering a very big amount of DOIs via our system (>10'000), we would be glad if you contacted us first.
We are planning to be ready with the new system by the end of next year.

For all those who are interested in FAIR data and data quality, you might want to look at the AtMoDat (Atmospheric Model Data) Project. Part of this project is to extend the existing DataCite MetadataSchema with the so called "Data Maturity Indicator". The purpose of this indicator is to add information concerning quality tests, quality results etc. directly into the metadata of a registered object. A draft will be presented to DataCite's Metadata working group shortly.

A group of libarians and IT scientists from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and Leibniz Supercomputing Centre have written an extensive Best Practice Guide to DataCite's Metadata Schema (Version 4.3).

If you are interested in what's going on in the PID world in general, you are welcome to join the PID Forum!