Dataset DOIs for Improved Findability, Acknowledgement of Data Creators, and Tracking of Data Reuse

Launched in 2016, The Infectious Diseases Data Observatory (IDDO) is a scientifically independent, multi-disciplinary coalition of the global infectious disease community. IDDO aims to expand data reuse and collaboration within the global health community to deliver better treatment and control of poverty-related infectious disease and emerging infections, expanding its proven model of evidence generation and building a unique global data library. It provides the methods, governance, and infrastructure to translate data into evidence that improves outcomes for patients worldwide. IDDO builds on and incorporates the pioneering work of the WorldWide Antimalarial Resistance Network (WWARN), a unique, decade-long collaborative data-sharing framework that proved it was possible to produce policy-changing scientific evidence from historical data, benefitting the health of millions. Ethical data reuse is at the heart of IDDO’s mission. Barriers to data sharing and data reuse such as lack of incentives or concern about ownership or receiving credit can be overcome by tracking metrics for data reuse in a way that credits the original creators of the data assets. Acknowledgement of the original creators of data resources is an important part of that work, especially as much of the data held by IDDO is generated in low and middle-income countries (LMICs). We mint a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) for every dataset contributed to the IDDO platform. This unique, persistent identifier (PID) contains rich metadata describing the data asset as well as information about the creators of that resource. Linking these creator names with their own PIDs, such as ORCID IDs or ROR IDs, allows for the tracking and linkage of data assets through the reuse lifecycle. This provides a clear, traceable record of data requests for reuse that can generate reuse metrics for a data asset and measure the impact of that resource beyond its original creation and use. The minting of DOIs also supports FAIR principles by the creation of rich, descriptive metadata about each dataset contributed to the IDDO platform. This increases the visibility and findability of datasets which in turn facilitates further reuse and generation of new evidence. Linking personal PIDs to these DOIs enables the tracking of data reuse through citations and publications that reference the study DOI (as required by IDDO’s Data Sharing/Use Agreement). These metrics can then be linked to institutions, investigators, and others involved in creating that data asset and can be tracked and visualized via resources like DataCite. IDDO’s practice of requiring those who request data from the platform for reuse to reference the individual dataset DOIs ensures proper attribution and recognition of the data creators and ensures researchers receive due credit every time their data is reused. These quantitative metrics allow for a transparent and traceable method of measuring impact of individual data assets over time as they are used again and again to generate new evidence by the research community.