The ALA now allows users to see a history of their occurrence record downloads. We have also introduced the automatic creation of a ‘digital object identifier’ (DOI) for every new download. DOIs are persistent identifiers, similar to a webpage URL, that are already widely used in scientific publications and for scientific data sets.
ALA users can see a history of their occurrence record downloads using the ‘View your downloaded records’ link, on the ‘My profile’ page. Users can re-download previous downloaded files and they can also re-run the search associated with a download.
Another new feature is the automatic creation of a ‘digital object identifier’ (DOI) for every new download. With every download now having a DOI, it will be easier for scientists to link their publications with the ‘source’ download data from the ALA. This will allow both the ALA and original data providers (museums, herbaria and citizen science projects) to track the use of their data through to publications and impact.