Roadmap
Guided by our multi-year strategic vision and with the collaboration of our global community, our roadmap is focused on iterative development of trusted and sustainable open infrastructure and persistent identifier services to make research outputs, activities, and resources findable, citable, connected, and reused globally.
Our roadmap is continuously evolving as the research landscape evolves. The information below provides a high-level view of current areas of focus as well as others on the horizon. All of our efforts are focused on driving the following strategic outcomes:
- Metadata quality and completeness
- Usability and discoverability of metadata and services
- Infrastructure integrity and scalability
We invite community members to contribute feedback about new product features and enhancements as well as metadata schema suggestions. Share your ideas, see others’ ideas, and learn more about our feedback process on GitHub.
For troubleshooting support or general questions, contact support@datacite.org.
Current Activities
Recent highlights
Enhanced provenance for the enriched DataCite metadata store
More provenance metadata is now available for metadata enrichments in an effort to make the enriched DataCite metadata store as transparent, traceable, verifiable, and reproducible as possible. Learn more in the September 2026 release notes.
Explore and retrieve an enriched DataCite metadata store with REST API querying and harvesting tools
Enriched DOI records can now be retrieved through the DataCite REST API as part of DOI list responses, opening up new ways to explore and retrieve an enriched version of the entire DataCite metadata store. Learn more in the August 2026 release notes.
Authenticate DataCite API requests with API keys
API keys can now be used to authenticate requests, such as DOI create and update requests, when using the DataCite REST and MDS APIs. Learn about this improvement to API security and usability in the July 2026 release notes.
New metadata quality snapshot for all DataCite DOIs in the Metadata Dashboard
We’ve added a new view to the Metadata Dashboard for all DataCite DOI metadata across every organization and repository. This view facilitates analysis of metadata quality across all of DataCite and can be used to benchmark individual organizations and repositories against the larger whole. Learn more in the June 2026 release notes.
Improvements to web accessibility across DataCite services
Learn more about improvements to web accessibility in DataCite Commons and DataCite Fabrica in the May 2026 and August 2026 release notes.
Working on
Enhanced DOI resolution reporting
Changes are coming to DOI resolution reporting to help DataCite Members understand resolution trends over time, track highly resolved DOIs, and take action on resolution problems. Take our survey to contribute to this ongoing work.
Improvements to citation reporting services
We’re working to enhance our citation reporting offerings while making important updates to the infrastructure that makes them possible. Learn more about these upcoming infrastructure updates.
More metadata enrichments and expanded insights into the enriched DataCite metadata store
We continue to expand metadata enrichment services as part of an ongoing, multi-faceted effort to improve the quality and utility of the DataCite metadata store and enhance discovery, reuse, and reporting across the research ecosystem. Learn more about what’s already possible in our documentation and give feedback via our enrichments survey.
DataCite Metadata Schema v4.8
The upcoming DataCite Metadata Schema update is on track to add support for community-requested features like access and availability information, a blog post resource type, resource reviewers, and more.