How permanent are metadata for research data? Understanding changes in DataCite DOI metadata

With the move towards open research information, the DOI registration agency DataCite is increasingly used as a source for metadata describing research data, for example to perform scientometric analyses. However, there is a lack of research on how DOI metadata describing research data are created and maintained. This paper adresses this gap by using DataCite metadata provenance information to analyze the overall prevalence and patterns of change to DataCite DOI metadata records. The results show that change of DataCite DOI metadata records is common, but it tends to be incremental and not extensive. DataCite DOI metadata records offer reliable descriptions of datasets and are stable enough to be used in scientometric research. The findings mirror insights from previous studies of metadata change in other contexts, suggesting that there are similarities in metadata practices between research data repositories and more traditional cataloging environments. However, the observed changes don't seem to fully align with idealized conceptualizations of metadata creation and maintenance for research data. In particular, the data does not show that metadata records are maintained continuously, and metadata change has a limited effect on metadata completeness.