Information for UK DataCite clients
Below are frequently asked questions, advice and links to useful technical documentation for data centres who are already registered with DataCite in the UK. Click on a section to skip to that part of the page.
Creating and managing your DOIs
- The person responsible for creating our DOIs has left
- Resetting my password
- We're changing the domain for our landing pages
- We need to add a domain to our account
- What happens if we don't want to renew our account?
- What happens if our organisation changes?
Technical documentation
Metadata Schema
Please see the DataCite Metadata Schema for current information.
APIs
DataCite has created an API for clients who wish to further automate the registration process. Please see the DataCite documentation for detailed technical information on the APIs for adding metadata and minting your DOI.
OAI-PMH
The DataCite OAI Provider is a service that exposes DataCite Metadata using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH).
Creating and managing your DOIs
Formatting your DOI
A DOI name consists of a prefix and a suffix separated by a forward slash (e.g. 10.1234/56789). Each organisation is assigned its own unique prefix, and decides its own suffix format.
The most important property of a DOI suffix is that it should be unique within the given prefix space. The dataCite system will reject any attempt to mint duplicate DOIs. Please consider the following points when creating your suffixes:
- We suggest that the optimum length is 8-10 characters. This is long enough to ensure uniqueness, but short enough to avoid any typing or text wrapping errors. The DataCite system will not accept DOIs longer than 255 characters
- DOIs are not case sensitive (10.1234/WXYZ and 10.1234/wxyz are the same DOI)
- We strongly recommend that only the following characters are used within a DOI name: “0–9”, “a–z”, and “–._/”. Although the DOI name itself can accomodate a wider range of characters, some require encoding so that the DOI works correctly when used in URL form. If you need to use additional characters, please follow the recommendations on encoding provided by the International DOI Foundation (IDF).
Can I delete a DOI?
No. DOIs are intended to be persistent identifiers and, as such, can not be deleted. If data is no longer available, you should provide a landing page for the DOI that explains why the data is no longer available.
Your DataCite account
The person responsible for creating our DOIs has left the organisation
If you need to update the email address associated with your account, please contact us and we will update it for you.You should also reset your password. You can do this from within your account, see Resetting my password.
Resetting my password
You can do this from within your account. Log in to the DataCite Metadata Store (MDS). Go to ‘My account’ (top right) and open the ‘Change password’ section. Clicking the button in here will automatically email the change password link to the address associated with your account – so you will need to make sure the associated email is up to date. If you have forgotten your password and so cannot reset it this way, see I have forgotten my password.
We’re changing the domain for our landing pages
Use the API to globally update all of your DOIs.
We need to add a domain to our account
Please contact us if you need to add a new website domain to your MDS account.
What happens if we do not want to renew our account?
If you decide that you no longer want or need to create DOIs, you will still be responsible for maintaining the DOIs you have already assigned. You will keep your DataCite account to do this, but we will simply disable your ability to mint new DOIs.
What happens if our organisation changes?
A change of responsibility for data was one of the things that DataCite was created for. If your organisation is passing responsibility for data on to another party, we will arrange with you both to transfer over ownership of the DOIs and prefix.
If your organisation is changing name but the DOIs will still be created and/or maintained by you, we may need to update your contract or DataCite account. Please contact us to discuss.
Troubleshooting
If you're having problems creating or updating your DOIs or managing your account, please see our troubleshooting page.
Glossary
The Glossary contains is a list of terms you will frequently come across in relation to DataCite and the registration of DOIs using the DataCite service. This is also available in a downloadable/printable form to keep handy on your desk/top.
