Role-based contributors (vs Personal or Organisation)

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1

We are trying to specify metadata for sensitive datasets. The points of contact will be role based e.g. “Institute of Health Studies Data Manager” rather than a specific human e.g. “John Woo”. The role is neither a specific human nor is it an Organisation.

Has anyone else specified something like this in the DataCite Schema in the Contributor field?

1 Like
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Great question! I’m interested in hearing how others have handled this case.

You can also omit nameType because this attribute is optional:

<xs:attribute name="nameType" type="nameType" use="optional"/>

https://schema.datacite.org/meta/kernel-4.4/metadata.xsd

3

Thanks for your response! I see in the schema documentation (page 21), Personal is marked as default. Does this mean that if the field is omitted, Personal will be used?

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I checked with our technical team, and if the field is omitted it will not be supplied; our systems do not add this field in automatically.

I think that “default” was intended to say that in most cases, users should default to “Personal” if they are unsure. I can confirm this with the DataCite Metadata Working Group and we will look into updating the schema documentation to be more clear.

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Thanks for this information - it will be very useful.