State of DDI Cloud

As the DDI community continues to grow, an increasing number of repositories are providing their metadata in various DDI formats. However, the current landscape of DDI metadata standards usage is not well understood. Understanding this landscape is crucial as it helps identifying usage patterns, improve interoperability, and guide future developments. To address this research gap, we investigated the availability and comprehensive element usage of DDI standards across 29 repositories registered on the platform re3data.org, using the OAI-PMH API. By analyzing approximately, a quarter of a million metadata records in DDI-Codebook format, we summarized statistics on the usage of popular DDI elements and their distribution across repositories. Our findings may have implications for the deployment of DDI metadata and the further development of these standards. They also inform researchers and data stewards about how DDI-Codebook is utilized by the community. Overall, this investigation underscores the value of openly available metadata in supporting research and achieving the goals of the FAIR data movement.