“I’m passionate about the transfer we’re seeing in research: moving from a cottage industry to a place where knowledge is increasingly coming through trusted processes.  Research data will be an output that can be used by lots of people.  The problem we have in research is that lots of people can’t use the data.  If we can create a trusted environment we can make a big difference to the way data is used.

Look, I’m old. I’m 62, and yet I’m passionate and I don’t want to give this up whilst this change is happening. I want to help get this set up for the next phase.  We can make it so that research data is much more available.  Our mission is to make research data more available for researchers, research institutions, the nation, and the global community.  This means that every day you jump from astronomy to history to social sciences, and you have to think about why it’s valuable to different sorts of people.  If you think about this problem in the right way, yes, you have to have technical support for this, but the heart of this is that you have to have trust.  That’s how you get things to happen.  So I measure data in trust rather than petabytes.  I measure data in people rather than petabytes.”