Publisher - research unit or repository

[Marta Hoffman]

Dear Working Group,

I have a question concerning the usage of the field "Publisher" for scientific datasets. The description I see in the DataCite Metadata Kernel suggests to me that if a researcher is submitting research data to a data repository, they should indicate their affiliating institution (e.g. the university they work at) as the data publisher. However, the typical usage I find is different, with the data repository positioned in the field "Publisher" (I see this policy e.g. in the citation formats suggested by the repositories Dryad, Zenodo, Figshare).

So: for the case of a researcher submitting data to a national repository for open data, what would the preferred interpretation of the "Publisher" field be, in your opinion? The name of the repository or of the affiliating institution?

Kind regards,

Marta Hoffman-Sommer

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Marta Hoffman-Sommer

Open Science Platform

ICM University of Warsaw

Warsaw, Poland

[Joan Starr]

Hello Marta,
In the documentation for the schema, we say the following for the Publisher property: "The name of the entity that holds, archives, publishes, prints, distributes, releases, issues, or produces the resource. This property will be used to formulate the citation, so consider the prominence of the role."
I think that this certainly leaves open the use case you describe, namely using the data repository in this position.
Please let us know if you have further questions.
Regards,
Joan Starr
Chair, DataCite Metadata Working Group