Mendeley was at the very first “Beyond the PDF” meeting in San Diego, which grew into FORCE11. We have been engaged with this community for almost as long as we have existed as a company, and though we aren’t on the group which drafted these principles and as yet have no formal stake in data management, we know personally and frequently interact with many of the people who are and do, thus we think it’s important that we announce our support for their work.

The Data Citation Principles cover a wide range of issues related to data, including specific issues relevant to us, such as credit, attribution, research impact, unique identification, and access. After all, what good is a citation that fails to resolve to the cited object, for either the citing or cited entity, and thus what use are they to a citation manager?

With our work as a leader in the altmetric community, we support researchers getting credit for all their work, not just that which is presented as a narrative publication. Looking at the broader research ecosystem, we can see that we must connect the whole provenance trail from the generation of the raw data to the publication of the figure to complete the cycle from reading and post-publication peer review to the generation of new hypotheses, protocols, and experiments. To this end, we’re also working on reproducible workflows with the Reproducibility Initiative, the importance of which was highlighted by a recent Nature editorial from the Director of the NIH and featured in today’s Elsevier Connect article from Genomics Data.

Congratulations to the FORCE11 team and the Data Citation Synthesis Working Group for taking this important step forward.