What We Do

DataCite is a leading global non-profit organization that provides persistent identifiers (DOIs) for research data and other research outputs. Organizations within the research community join DataCite as members to be able to assign DOIs to all their research outputs. This way, their outputs become discoverable and associated metadata is made available to the community. DataCite then develops additional services to improve the DOI management experience, making it easier for our members to connect and share their DOIs with the broader research ecosystem and to assess the use of their DOIs within that ecosystem. DataCite is an active participant in the research community and promotes data sharing and citation through community-building efforts and outreach activities.

All software written by DataCite staff is available with an OSI-approved open license via the DataCite GitHub account, and we encourage all staff members to contribute to open source software projects. The technologies we use have changed over the years, currently Ruby and Python for backend services, and Javascript (Typescript, React and Ember) for frontend services are most widely used. Almost all services run in the AWS Cloud, and we make heavy use of Docker, Terraform, and GitHub Actions.