On 24 January, the DOI registration agency DataCite announced the launch of version 4.5 of its metadata schema.
This latest version, developed by the Metadata Working Group in collaboration with DataCite staff, includes key additions and updates to Schema 4 that enable repositories to produce richer and more accurate metadata:
- Support for Instruments – “Instrument” is now one of the possible values for the resourceTypeGeneral field
- Support for Pre-registrations and Registered Reports – the value “StudyRegistration” can now be selected in the resourceTypeGeneral field
- Identifiers for Publishers – it is now possible to insert a value in the Publisher field using a persistent identifier (e.g. ROR)
- Definition Updates and New Guidance – a list of all changes can be found here
- Updated Documentation Format – new format (but you can still download the description as a PDF: https://schema.datacite.org/meta/kernel-4.5/)
More about the new version of the schema is available on the DataCite’s website.
The agency also emphasizes that version 3 of the schema will no longer be supported on January 1, 2025. From that point on, DataCite members and consortium member organizations will be required to use the metadata schema from version 4 for DOI registration and DOI metadata updates. More on the retirement of version 3 here.
DataCite hosted a webinar to introduce the new version of the metadata schema and discuss the transition from version 3. The webinar will tookplace on 13 March at 4PM.
All presentations from the webinar are available for download here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10813183.