Relationship between Invenio publication_date field and Datacite publicationYear

[cc-a]

Follow on from an discussion raised in #87.

There is a mapping between the Invenio publication_date field and the Datacite publicationYear field. We have taken the step to hide the publication_date field in the deposit form so that it is not set by the user. Instead this value is set to the current date when a draft record is initially created and is not updated on subsequent edits in either the draft or published state (to be investigated and confirmed).

The Datacite schema says of the publicationYear field:

The year when the data was or will be made publicly available... If an embargo period has been in effect, use the date when the embargo period ends. In the case of datasets, “publish” is understood to mean making the data available on a specific date to the community of researchers.

In order to respect the intention of this field for DataCite some potential questions arise:

• Is the publicationYear actually determined by a direct mapping of publication_date when pushing metadata to Datacite?
• Could the publicationYear value be incorrect if a draft is created in one calendar year and published in the next?
• Does the value for publicationYear respect the guidance with regard to embargo periods.
• How is publication_date or publicationYear handled in different versions of an individual record.

This issue is a placeholder for further investigation into the current behavior to potentially develop recommendations to change it.