Why use the service

Making your equipment visible to other researchers and organisations enables a number of economic and environmental benefits and sustainable practices. The national register created by the equipment data service will be able to provide a robust evidence base to support sector-wide approaches to efficiency, procurement, usage, sharing, future planning, place and investment strategies, recycling and decommissioning, and energy, costs and environmental management.

Beyond community benefits using the service can now enable you and your organisation to evidence the impact of investments in research equipment by uniquely identifying the equipment and linking it to research outputs. This evidence can be used in funding proposals and assessment exercises.

What's new

Data management platform

The service will now provide the capability to assign DataCite Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for research equipment via a data management platform. This functionality enables institutions to create persistent links between equipment investments and their resulting research outputs and publications.

Key benefits include:

• Ability to identify individual pieces of equipment enabling improved research reproducibility.
• Enhanced ability to evaluate the impact of equipment investments.
• Better tracking of research infrastructure utilisation through citations and online references.
• Increased discovery of research equipment through international registries and citations

The service will create DOIs for any equipment record that the institution requests, with 2 exceptions:

• Facilities (as opposed to specific equipment), which can be identified using a ROR.
• Equipment that already has an existing DOI (to avoid duplication).

This approach ensures each piece of equipment has a unique, authoritative identifier while avoiding duplication in the persistent identifier ecosystem.

See user guide for requesting DOIs.

Data model

We have updated our service model to meet new use cases which includes the ability to assign Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for equipment, as mentioned above, which will enable the linking and tracking of equipment and research outputs. The new service data model supports richer metadata collection to grow a national database to help support investment decisions and improve procurement processes. Read more about our data model and data model in detail for more information on what is required for each metadata field.

Improved search

We have improved the search and discover functionality. You can now narrow search terms by institution, consortium or region. You can filter by status of the record and other entities. You can also discover by broader themes. Read more about our search and discover functionality.