DataCite Release Notes – September 2026

[codycooperross]

We're excited to share the latest releases, feature enhancements, and other improvements across our services. Here's what's new:

Enhanced provenance for the enriched DataCite metadata store

DataCite offers a community-enriched DOI metadata layer that enhances the quality and utility of the DataCite metadata store while maintaining access to original metadata records. Alongside Collaborative Metadata (COMET), we strive to make this enriched metadata layer as transparent, traceable, verifiable, and reproducible as possible.

To this end, we’ve added a sourceId attribute to every enrichment record used to enhance DataCite metadata. The sourceId contains a DOI identifying the COMET project that produced the enrichment record. This DOI can be used to explore project abstracts, related datasets and workflows, connected people and organizations, and more via the DOI metadata. The sourceId attribute replaces the previous contributors and resources attributes, providing a simple, persistent way to retrieve more comprehensive provenance information about metadata enrichments.

Explore enrichment records at the enrichments endpoint, learn about enrichment projects currently available in DataCite using DataCite Commons, and retrieve a complete version of the enriched DataCite metadata store with these enhancements using the enriched=true attribute of the DataCite REST API. Tell us what you think by taking our enrichments survey or by responding to this discussion.

More improvements

• The REST API now provides more detailed error reporting for JSON requests during DOI metadata creation and updates, making it easier to locate problems with requests and contribute well-structured DOI metadata.
• As part of streamlining the data stored in Event Data, we stopped ingesting new events that are no longer in scope. In Q4 2026, we will remove previously added events that are no longer in scope. Learn more about the completed and upcoming changes to Event Data here: DataCite Event Data Changes