This is the seventeen in the series of short statements from candidates in the forthcoming CODATA Elections at the General Assembly to be held on 9-10 November in Gaborone, Botswana, following International Data Week. Virginia Murray Chuang is a candidate for the CODATA Executive Committee as an ordinary member. She was nominated by USA.

I qualified in medicine and joined Guy and St Thomas’s Hospital Poisons Unit and was appointed consultant medical toxicologist. In 1989 I started the Chemical Incident Research Programme and from 1995 was Director of the Chemical Incident Response Service. Here we supported emergency services and other partners for acute and chronic chemical incident response and developed evidence informed guidance for preparedness and incident management. In 2011 I was appointed as Head of Extreme Events and Health Protection, Public Health England and developed evidence base information and advice on flooding, heat, cold, volcanic ash, and other extreme weather and natural hazards events following being a first author of one of the chapters for the special IPCC report on extreme events and disasters [i] Currently I am  the Head of Global Disaster Risk Reduction (GDRR) for Public Health England, which has supported my role as a member and previous vice-chair of the UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR) Scientific and Technical Advisory Group from 2008-2017 where she was actively engaged in supporting the negotiations

Data is critical for the implementation of the recent synchronous adoption of the 2015 landmark UN agreements of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015 – 2030^[ii], the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) ^[iii], and the COP21’s Paris Climate Conference^[iv]. It also imperative for the use of the WHO’s International Health Regulations 2005^[v] and has created a rare but significant opportunity to build coherence across different but overlapping policy areas.  In my GDRR role  I have engaged with many science and technology partners in supporting the UNISDR STAG/ ICSU/IAP partnership to make the Sendia Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 very reflective of data needs.

“Disaster risk reduction requires a multi-hazard approach and inclusive risk-informed decision-making based on the open exchange and dissemination of disaggregated data, including by sex, age and disability, as well as on easily accessible, up-to-date, comprehensible, science-based, non-sensitive risk information, complemented by traditional knowledge;”

When considered together, these frameworks make for a more complete agenda to build resilience and take action in areas including health, climate and disaster risk reduction.  This integrated thinking will serve to strengthen existing risk frameworks for multi hazard assessments and aim to develop a dynamic, local, preventive and adaptive urban governance system at global, national, and local levels.

To do this we need to measure and manage data. The frameworks must be ‘strengthened [by] effective implementation and monitoring’ calling for ‘a data revolution, rigorous accountability mechanisms and renewed global partnerships’.^[vi]

The benchmarking of countries’ performance against indicators linked to global agreements is a powerful way to engage governments and mobilise resources—no country wants to fall behind.^[vii]

During 2017, CODATA initiated and led a discussion with data science groups and international scientific unions and associations about the timeliness of a major initiative on interdisciplinary data integration.  Meetings at the ICSU HQ in Paris in June 2017 and at the Royal Society of London in November 2017 produced a report and communiqué supporting a long-term initiative and outlining some of the essential issues to be addressed.   The key priorities for this initiative are to address data integration in support of major global challenges and to develop relevant data capacities across all the disciplines of science.

The CODATA initiative on interdisciplinary data integration is seeking to explore these challenges and opportunities in relation to three specific case studies in interdisciplinary research: infectious disease outbreaks, disaster risk and resilient cities.  I am the lead for the disaster risk case study and work very closely wiht the infectious diseases and Resilient Cities programmes and 1 want to continue to advocate for the these case studies as we move into the development of this programme over the next three years – and these developments are best summarised in this figure below:

To me these case studies provide a concrete focus for exploring the potential of interoperability and data integration through metadata alignment via CODATA. The Interoperability of Metadata Standards in Cross-Domain Science, Health, and Social Science Applications  has shown that standards are a vital tool enabling integration and semantic linking of data within and between disciplines.

However, standards tend to get developed and adopted within disciplines or application domains with little consideration of cross-discipline requirements and technologies, so data integration can often only be easily achieved within and between closely allied fields. For example:

• Addressing global scientific challenges that depend on cross-discipline integration remains difficult. The challenge is to make cross-discipline data integration a routine aspect of data-driven science.
• Metadata support data discovery, selection, access and use, and are critical for data integration.

I believe the commitment to the delivery of these pilots would benefit from active CODATA executive committee engagement.

More widely my current roles include being a member of the Integrated Research on Disaster Risk (IRDR) scientific committee,  co-sponsored by the International Science Council (ISC) and the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR)  and Co-Chair of IRDR’s Disaster Loss Data (DATA),  and  currently co-chair of CODATA’s  Linked Open Data for Global Disaster Risk Research . I am a member the UNSDSN Data for Sustainable Development, co-chair of the recently developed WHO Thematic Platform Health and Disaster Risk Management Research Network  and a visiting/honorary Professor at several universities including University College London (2013) and at the United Nations University International Institute for Global Health  (2017)

[i]     Murray, V., G. McBean, M. Bhatt, S. Borsch, T.S. Cheong, W.F. Erian, S. Llosa, F. Nadim, M. Nunez, R. Oyun, and A.G. Suarez, 2012: Case studies. In: Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation [Field, C.B., V. Barros, T.F. Stocker, D. Qin, D.J. Dokken, K.L. Ebi, M.D. Mastrandrea, K.J. Mach, G.-K. Plattner, S.K. Allen, M. Tignor, and P.M. Midgley (eds.)]. A Special Report of Working Groups I and II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, and New York, NY, USA, pp. 487-542.

[ii]    United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction. Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030. 2015 www.wcdrr.org/uploads/Sendai_Framework_for_Disaster_Risk_Reduction_2015_2030.pdf.

[iii]    United Nations. Sustainable Development Goals. 2015. www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals.

[iv]    United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The Paris Agreement. 2015. http://unfccc.int/paris_agreement/items/9485.php .

[v]    World Health Organization International health regulations (2005) http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/43883/9789241580410_eng.pdf;jsessionid=CEE24A3C20CA531AF6EC44F2586BA885?sequence=1

[vi]    United Nations – The Road to Dignity by 2030: Ending Poverty, Transforming All Lives and Protecting the Planet Synthesis Report of the Secretary-General On the Post-2015 Agenda December 2014 http://www.un.org/disabilities/documents/reports/SG_Synthesis_Report_Road_to_Dignity_by_2030.pdf

[vii]    Maini, R., Law, R., Duque III, F., Balboa, G., Noda, H., Nakamura, S. and Murray V. Monitoring progress towards planetary health – International agreements must include appropriate indicators, published regularly. BMJ 2017;359:j5279

This is the fifteen in the series of short statements from candidates in the forthcoming CODATA Elections at the General Assembly to be held on 9-10 November in Gaborone, Botswana, following International Data Week. Tony Hey is a candidate for the CODATA Executive Committee as CODATA President.  He was nominated by UK.

CODATA’s Mission

“CODATA exists to promote global collaboration to advance Open Science and to improve the availability and usability of data for all areas of research.  CODATA supports the principle that data produced by research and susceptible to be used for research should be as open as possible and as closed as necessary.  CODATA works also to advance the interoperability and the usability of such data: research data should be FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable). By promoting the policy, technological and cultural changes that are essential to promote Open Science, CODATA helps advance ISC’s vision and mission of advancing science as a global public good” [1]

Preface

In my present position as the Chief Data Scientist of the UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), I am based at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL), on the Harwell Campus near Oxford. The Harwell site hosts the Diamond Synchrotron, the ISIS Neutron Source and the UK’s Central Laser Facility.  My primary role is to support the university users of these large-scale experimental facilities at RAL in managing and analyzing their research data.  The users of these facilities now perform experiments that generate increasingly large and complex datasets which need to be curated, analyzed, visualized and archived, and their new scientific discoveries published in a manner consistent with the FAIR principles. In addition, I work with the Hartree Supercomputing Centre at the STFC’s Daresbury Lab near Manchester. The Hartree Centre works mainly with industry and supports their computer modelling and data science requirements.

I am therefore intimately acquainted with the challenges of open science and believe, thanks in part to the activities of CODATA, together with its fellow ISC organization, the World Data System (WDS) and now also with their younger partner, the Research Data Alliance (RDA), that the global scientific research community has made significant progress towards the goals of the CODATA mission over the last five years. However, there is still much more to do before we can realize anything close to the Jim Gray’s vision of the full text of all publications online and accessible, linked to the original datasets with sufficient metadata that other researchers can reuse and add new data to generate new scientific discoveries. In his last talk before he went missing at sea, he summed up this vision in the ‘pyramid’ diagram below [2]:

The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) has a similar vision but is aiming to provide a much more detailed roadmap towards realizing a vision of global research that is Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR). The work of the EOSCpilot project to define a core set of metadata properties – the EOSC Dataset Minimum Information or EDMI – that are “sufficient to enable data to be findable by users and suitably ‘aware’ programmatic services” is a good start [3]. The Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) established in 2018, subsuming the Australian National Data Service (ANDS), also has a similar vision.

My Vision for CODATA

I very much support the three major strategic programs put forward in CODATA’s Strategic Plan 2013 – 2018, namely:

• Data Principles and Practice
• Frontiers of Data Science
• Capacity Building

However, given the promising developments of the last five years it is now time to develop a third strategic plan covering the next five years of the CODATA organization. Development of this new strategic plan must be a major priority for CODATA and it will be important to reach out to all the relevant national and international stakeholder organizations for their input. However, in addition to CODATA’s traditional stakeholders, I would also like to learn from the experience of other major efforts in this space. For example, from the US, this could include input from the NIH’s National Library of Medicine, the DOE’s OSTI organization and the NSF’s DataONE project. From Europe, there will be much activity in creating an implementation of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). I would also look for input from other major data science initiatives in Asia and Australia.

In addition to developing detailed plans and deliverables for the three broad CODATA priority areas for the next five years, I would like to give my support to two other areas. During my career in data-intensive science – in the UK with e-Science and in my work with Microsoft Research in the US – I have worked closely with universities and funding agencies in Europe, North and South America, Asia and Australia. I now think it is important to dedicate more attention to Africa where I think CODATA can play a significant role. I am therefore personally very supportive of the existing CODATA initiative to develop an African Open Science Platform and would look for ways to extend this initiative and increase its impact. One way in which to do this is to harness CODATA’s global reach and influence which can successfully bring together countries at many different levels of economic development. The international SKA project will also generate many interesting computing, data science and networking challenges in Africa.

The second focus I would like to develop is related to my present role as leader of the Scientific Machine Learning research group at RAL. There is now much activity world-wide in the application of the latest advances in AI and Machine Learning technologies to scientific data. This is one of the few areas where the academic research community has large and complex data sets that can compete with the ‘Big Data’ available to industry. Extracting new scientific insights from these datasets will require the use of advanced statistical techniques, including Bayesian methods and ‘deep learning’ technologies. In addition, an extensive education program to train researchers in the application of these data analytic technologies will be necessary and can build upon practical experience in applying such methods to ‘Big Scientific Data.’ In this way CODATA can help train a new generation of data analysts who are not only able to generate new insights from scientific data but also to spur innovation with industry and aid economic development.

While at Microsoft Research, I was a founding Board member of the RDA organization. As an RDA  Board member, I liaised extensively with both the NSF in the USA, and with the Commission in Europe, and assisted in facilitating the constructive cooperation of RDA with CODATA. I will therefore bring extensive management experience to the leadership of CODATA – from my experience in the university sector as research group leader, department chair and dean of engineering, in UK research funding councils as a program director and chief data scientist, and in industry as manager of a globally distributed outreach team. I am disappointed to see the absence of many European countries from the CODATA membership and, through my experience in European research projects, I would seek to encourage these missing nations to become members of the organization. In addition, in my role at Microsoft Research, I spent considerable time visiting universities and funding agencies in Central and South America, and in Asia. I believe there is considerable potential to interest non-member countries in these regions in the relevance of the data science agenda of CODATA. Finally, although I will certainly bring my vision, enthusiasm and energy to the role of CODATA President, I believe that we must harvest the energy and enthusiasm of the entire CODATA community to take the organization forward to a new level of influence and effectiveness.

My Background

I am standing for election to the CODATA Presidency because I have long been an advocate for Open Access and Open Science. My passion for this topic and for the era of ‘Big Scientific Data’ dates back to the years from 2001 to 2005 when I was director of the UK’s eScience program. With Anne Trefethen, I wrote a paper in 2003 with the title “The Data Deluge: An e-Science Perspective”. This paper was certainly one of the earliest papers to talk about the transformative effects on science of the imminent deluge of scientific data [4]. In 2006, I was invited to give a keynote talk on eScience at the CODATA Conference in Beijing. While a Vice President in Microsoft Research, we celebrated the achievements of my late colleague, the Turing Award winner Jim Gray, by publishing a collection of essays in 2009 that illustrated the emergence of a new ‘Fourth Paradigm’ of Data-Intensive Science [4].

During the eScience program, which received significant funding from both the UK Research Councils and from Jisc, the UK research community explored many issues about the scientific data pipeline that are still important and relevant today. One project, for example, examined the preservation and sharing of scientific workflows. Another project looked in detail at recording the provenance of a dataset. This effort ultimately led in 2013 to the emergence of the W3C ‘PROV’ standard for provenance. Several other eScience projects explored the use of RDF and semantic web technologies such as OWL and SPARQL for enhancing research metadata. Although these technologies have proved popular with several academic research communities, it is probably fair to say that they have not so far been broadly adopted by most research communities nor by the major IT companies. In my role as chair of Jisc’s research committee, I supported the establishment of the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) in Edinburgh in 2004. The DCC was one of the first organizations to propose a set of guidelines for scientific data management plans (DMPs). The Jisc research committee also funded the National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM) in Manchester which offers a broad range of text-mining services. In the age of ‘Big Scientific Data’, high-bandwidth, end-to-end networking performance is an increasingly necessary element of a nation’s e-infrastructure. As a result, the Jisc research committee funded Janet, the UK’s NREN, to follow the lead of SURFnet in the Netherlands by introducing optical fibre ‘lambda’ technology.  Janet can now provide dedicated ‘lightpath’ support to users requiring long-term, persistent high-volume data transfers between locations. I believe that these e-Science examples still have relevance to CODATA and to the practice of data science today.

Progress towards Open Science, Open Access and ‘Open’ Data

Open science must start with genuine open access to the full text of research papers. Before becoming Director of the UK’s eScience program, I was Head of Department of the Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) Department and then Dean of Engineering at the University of Southampton. Recognizing the crisis that university library budgets were facing in terms of rising journal subscriptions, with the support of Wendy Hall, Stevan Harnad and Les Carr, the ECS Department funded and developed the well-known ePrints repository software and established one of the first ‘Green Open Access’ institutional repositories. In the UK, there is now wide-spread deployment of university research repositories that contain the full text of research papers, albeit with access usually subject to a publisher embargo period of 6 or 12 months.

By contrast, in the US, a historic memo from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) in 2013 required US funding agencies “to develop a plan to support increased public access to the results of research funded by the Federal Government.” More importantly for CODATA’s agenda, the memo also specified that the ‘results of research’ include not only the scientific research papers but also the accompanying research data. It defined research data as “the digital recorded factual material commonly accepted in the scientific community as necessary to validate research findings including data sets used to support scholarly publications, but does not include laboratory notebooks, preliminary analyses, drafts of scientific papers, plans for future research, peer review reports, communications with colleagues, or physical objects, such as laboratory specimens.”

The OSTP memo has led to all the major US funding agencies developing open science policies and establishing research repositories that contain the full text of research papers linked to the corresponding datasets generated by the researchers that they fund. The two most prominent repository systems are the National Institutes of Health’s PubMed Central with its associated databases, and the Department of Energy’s PAGES system managed by the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI). In contrast to this US funding agency centred view, UK Research Councils now require all researchers to have a Data Management Plan in their research proposals and look to the universities and specialist subject repositories to be responsible for the outputs of research that they fund. For example, one Council, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, now requires that “Research organizations will ensure that EPSRC-funded research data is securely preserved for a minimum of 10 years from the date that any researcher ‘privileged access’ period expires”.

The developments described above have taken place over the last five years and constitute significant progress toward open science. I am therefore optimistic that CODATA, together with WDS and RDA, and supported by national and international research funding agencies, can continue to make major strides towards changing the culture of researchers about their research data. My optimism is further fuelled by the steady increase in research registrations for ORCID IDs and DOIs for datasets and software by university researchers.

Two very recent developments are also exciting. The first is the announcement of Science Europe’s ‘cOAlition’ for open access. Eleven European research funding agencies have agreed to focus their open science efforts on the very ambitious ‘Plan S’ – which aims at ‘Making Open Access a Reality by 2020’ [5]. The second notable development is Google’s introduction of a new Dataset Search service which has the potential to become a significant aid to data discoverability. The service makes use of the industry supported ‘schema.org’ initiative which aims to add some semantic information to the metadata describing the dataset.

 “Schema.org is a collaborative, community activity with a mission to create, maintain, and promote schemas for structured data on the Internet, on web pages, in email messages, and beyond. Schema.org vocabulary can be used with many different encodings, including RDFa, Microdata and JSON-LD. These vocabularies cover entities, relationships between entities and actions, and can easily be extended through a well-documented extension model” [7].

The recent work by the ELIXIR collaboration on the Bioschemas extension to schema.org is intended to improve data interoperability in life sciences research. Bioschemas is a collection of specifications that provide guidelines to facilitate a more consistent adoption of schema.org markup within the life sciences [8]. Such initiatives and  are important indicators of the direction of open science.  I therefore believe that a pragmatic approach to machine actionable metadata that is based on schema.org and subject-specific extensions represents a practical way forward for the majority of scientific research communities.

Tony Hey
Rutherford Appleton Laboratory
Science and Technology Facilities Council
Harwell Campus
Didcot, OX11 0QX, UK

 References

[1] CODATA Mission statement, http://www.codata.org/about-codata/our-mission

[2] “The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery”, edited by Tony Hey, Stewart Tansley and Kristin Tolle, published by Microsoft Research, 2009, ISBN: 978-0-9825442-0-4

[3] EOSCpilot, D6.3: 1^st Report on Data Interoperability: Findability and Interoperability, https://eoscpilot.eu/sites/default/files/eoscpilot-d6.3.pdf

[4] Tony Hey and Anne Trefethen.  “The Data Deluge: An e-Science Perspective”, Chapter in “Grid Computing – Making the Global Infrastructure a Reality”, edited by F Berman, G C Fox and A J G Hey, Wiley, pp.809-824 (2003)

[5] Plan-S, https://www.scienceeurope.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/cOAlitionS_Press_Release.pdf

[6] Google Dataset Search, https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/09/building-google-dataset-search-and.html

[7] Schema.org, https://schema.org/

[8] Bioschemas, http://bioschemas.org/

This is the fourteen in the series of short statements from candidates in the forthcoming CODATA Elections at the General Assembly to be held on 9-10 November in Gaborone, Botswana, following International Data Week. Dr. Tyng-Ruey Chuang is a candidate for the CODATA Executive Committee as an ordinary member. He was nominated by the Academy of Sciences located in Taipei.

I read, admire, and agree with the CODATA’s strategic priorities (as detailed in its 2015 report) on Data Principles and Practices, Frontiers of Data Science, and Capacity Building. I have been working for the last 15 years with researchers from multiple disciplines on data management systems, copyrights and public licenses, as well as open data policies. The goal of these collaborations, always, is to make better use of research data. My training and experience in information science and engineering aligns strongly with the CODATA priorities.

In the past few years, I have collaborated with the Taiwan Endemic Species Research Institute on a communal data workflow for the Taiwan Roadkill Observation Network [1]. The result was presented at SciDataCon 2016 [2] and the dataset deposited to GBIF for wide reuse [3]. I have worked with memory institutions on setting up the Sunflower Movement Archive [4]. The result was reported at Digital Humanities 2017 [5]. Both collaborations emphasize building up the necessary frameworks for community involvement, as well as the use of Creative Commons Licenses to facilitate public access to research materials.

I had been the public lead of Creative Commons Taiwan since its beginning in early 2003 until its transition to a community project in June 2018. I was a co-PI of the Open Source Software Foundry (2003 – 2017). These two long-running projects were supported by Academia Sinica in Taipei to outreach to the general public, researchers, and policy makers in Taiwan about the principles and practices of public licenses and free software. Capacity building is an integral part of the two projects.

Currently I am a member of CODATA’s International Data Policy Committee, and a co-chair of CODATA’s task group on Citizen Science and Crowdsourced Data. It has been a honor working with CODATA colleagues in these endeavors. The experience rather confirms my view that capacity building in data principles and practices is an urgent issue for many research institutions.

I am a part of CODATA Taiwan, and once served as its executive secretary (2007 — 2013). I have participated in CODATA General Assembly since 2008, and have organized sessions in the 2010 and 2012 CODATA International Conference, and in the 2014, 2016, and 2018 SciDataCon Conference. The 2012 CODATA International Conference was held in Taipei; I led a local team working with the CODATA Secretariat to organize the conference to a great success.

I am an associate research fellow at the Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, Taipei, with a joint appointment at both the Research Center for Information Technology Innovation and the Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences. I was a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University, supported in part by a Fulbright senior research grant (2011 — 2012). I am currently a member of the Creative Commons’ Policy Advisory Council (2016 — ). I served, for several times, as a board member of the Taiwan Association of Human Rights, and as a board member of the Software Liberty Association of Taiwan.

[1] <https://roadkill.tw/en>

[2] <https://roadkill.tw/sites/roadkill/files/content/communal_data_workflow_in_tairon.pdf>

[3] <https://www.gbif.org/dataset/db09684b-0fd1-431e-b5fa-4c1532fbdb14>

[4] <http://public.318.io/>

[5] <https://dh2017.adho.org/abstracts/350/350.pdf>

This is the thirteen in the series of short statements from candidates in the forthcoming CODATA Elections at the General Assembly to be held on 9-10 November in Gaborone, Botswana, following International Data Week. Alena Rybkina is a candidate for the CODATA Executive Committee as CODATA Vice President.  She was nominated by Russia, IUGG.

Dr. Alena Rybkina is the deputy director of the Geophysical center of the Russian Academy of Sciences (GC RAS).

She has been serving on the position of the CODATA executive committee member since 2014, secretary general of the Russian National committee and co-opted member of the Union Commission on Data and Information (UCDI). She was an active member of the CODATA Task Group “Earth and Space Science Data Interoperability” and co-authored the “Atlas of the Earth’s Magnetic Field”.

She took part in a number of the international and national projects including programs of Ministry of education and science, Russian scientific foundation, Foundation for basic research. She is an active member of the RAS Committee on System Analysis that serves as the Russian NMO of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.

She is experienced in the organization of international and national events devoted to promotion of data science in Russia and other countries. In particular she was the principal organizer of the conferences “Electronic Geophysical Year: State of the Art and Results” in 2009, Pereslavl-Zalessky, “Artificial Intelligence in the Earth’s Magnetic Field Study. INTERMAGNET Russian Segment” in 2011, Uglich. “Geophysical Observatories, Multifunctional GIS and Data Mining” in 2013, Kaluga. “Data Intensive System Analysis for Geohazard Studies” in 2016, Sochi. In 2017 she initiated CODATA regional conference “Global challenges and data-driven science”. The Conference brought together leading data scientists, data managers and specialists as well as Big Data experts from more than 35 countries. Such international event provides higher visibility of the existed studies and face the community with the new goals. Growing utilitarian importance of science diplomacy is reflected in various international science activities and CODATA international conference in Saint Petersburg played important role in this dimension.

For the last decades, Alena has been working in the field of data collection, data mining and visualization. She a specialist in implementation of modern information and visualization technologies in the research and industrial domain. Among principal goals is the development of the spherical projection system and software aimed at visualization of various geo data sets and popularization of the Earth sciences and its implementation within scientific and educational organizations in Russia and abroad. Her research background is geology with the focus on the reconstruction of the paleo environment. She took part in geological expeditions in Russia, Ukraine, France and Italy to collect geomagnetic data.

On the position of the Vice-President she will be aimed in promotion of efficient global collaboration for improved knowledge, understanding of the earth system and sustainable development. Her experience in scientific management will help to build an effective system for integrating and managing research needs. She will focus on the visibility of current and future CODATA projects through global research community. Among the principal goals is an involvement of a new national members and support from stakeholders. Effective data science dialog should be established between nations and continents and CODATA should be recognized as a new platform for future collaboration.

The merger of ICSU and the ISSC require a strategic overview of the current CODATA activities to build an effective system for global collaboration in data science.

This is the twelveth in the series of short statements from candidates in the forthcoming CODATA Elections at the General Assembly to be held on 9-10 November in Gaborone, Botswana, following International Data Week. Pamela Maras is a candidate for the CODATA Executive Committee as an ordinary member.  She was nominated by IUPsyS.

Professor Pam Maras (CSci, CPsychol, FBPS)

Professor Pam Maras is the President of Union of Psychological Science (IUPsyS) which is a full member of the International Science Council.

CODATA is important as a scientific committee of ICSU in promoting “the effective exploitation of data as the single most important international issue of “policy for science””. CODATA is in a unique position at the pivotal tine of the inaugurated International Science Council (ISC) as the global body to represent international science in all its forms in the promotion and dissemination of science. The ethical and open access of ‘big data’ including for public good is essential in the fast changing environment and can only really be achieved through geographic and disciplinary collaboration, that includes all areas of the science community (represented in ISC) and in all regions of the world.  A challenge for us, is to ensure that scientists collectively ‘buy in’ to processes including for data that are less easy to curate generated from the social sciences. It is this area that Professor Maras would offer expertise.

As a psychologist Professor Maras’ contribution if elected would be in relation to human behavior; both of the scientists likely to draw on ‘big data’ and the outcomes of research drawing on ‘big data’ including in areas of interdisciplinary relevance.  Professor Maras has expertise directly relevant to the impact of large data, and the development and implementation of policy and its adoption in an ethical manner. This can only really be effectively and achieved with integrity if common process for curation, storage and inclusion are not only designed but adopted; the latter is likely to be as hard or harder than the former and requires a shared understanding and commitment to act which can only be achieved by cooperation and agreed compromise.

Pam Maras is Professor in Social and Educational Psychology at the University of Greenwich, London, U.K., where she holds a senior leadership position (including as Chair of the University Ethics Committee and in international collaborations). She researches and publishes in the applied area of social inclusion; particularly in relation to children and young people’s self-concept, social identity, learning and behavior across the world. Her publications included in the UK national assessment of research excellence in 2014 (Research Excellence Framework, 2014) were independently rated as internationally excellent or outstanding. She has attracted considerable personal research funding and has research collaborations including in Africa, Australasia, China, Europe (including France, Nederland, Spain and Italy), the Nordic Countries (including Norway) North and Latin America and SE Asia.

Professor Maras has international leadership experience outside of her employed post, she has  held elected positions in the British Psychological Society (BPS) including as President where she  led the portfolio for international links, during which time she forged links with other associations leading to memoranda of understanding as a means of ensuring collective activity in Europe and more widely. As a member of the IUPsyS leadership team for international capacity building for eight years.  Professor Maras has taken a principled approach to the involvement of geographic regions in setting their own agenda. This has included work in Eastern Europe, the ASEAN region, the Caribbean and Latin America, having been involved in activity leading to declarations of regional collaboration in the Caribbean and Africa.

This is the eleventh in the series of short statements from candidates in the forthcoming CODATA Elections at the General Assembly to be held on 9-10 November in Gaborone, Botswana, following International Data Week. Jianhui LI is a candidate for the CODATA Executive Committee as a Vice President.  He was nominated by China, PASTD, LODGD, USA.

Dr. Jianhui Li is the department director of Computer Network information Center (CNIC), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), a Professor and PhD Supervisor at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, an Ordinary Member of the Executive Committee of CODATA (2014-2016,2016-2018). He has worked on data infrastructure, data management and data-intensive computing since 1999, and has led the scientific data infrastructure development and open data activities in CAS for more than 10 years.

He has been always promoted the implementation of open data principles, data policies and put them into real practices as well. In 2017, He launched China’s first national-level large-scale survey on data sharing, which helped MOST formulate the first national policy on scientific data management and openness in China. To nourish a local data sharing culture among the Chinese research community, he launched a bilingual open-access data journal China Scientific Data (www.csdata.org), together with the data repository ScienceDB(http://www.sciencedb.cn). Moreover, he is a very active data scientist and leader in advancing the frontiers of data sciences. He is in charge of the development of the CAS Scientific Data Cloud for Big Data Analysis and Large Scale Data-Intensive Scientific Research. He is now leading the development of one scientific big data management system funded by the National Key R&D Plan, and serves as co-chair of the technology working group in the CASEarth Programme(http://www.casearth.com ) – a CAS Strategic Pioneer Research and Development Programme mainly focusing on building a global big data network to study Earth and support research on climate change, as well as to predict and mitigate natural disasters.

He has severed as Secretary General of CODATA-China for 10 years and organized a serial of successful international and domestic activities, including China-US Roundtable on Scientific Data, Training workshop for Developing Countries on Scientific Data, and National Scientific Data Conference. He initiated the International Training Workshop for Developing Countries on Scientific Data, sponsored jointly by CAS, CODATA and CODATA-CHINA. The training workshop has been held four times in 2012, 2014, 2016 and 2017, which attracted more than 80 participants from over 20 developing countries involved. The Annual National Scientific Data Conference is another event initiated in 2014 and now is the most important national academic conference on scientific data in China, providing a friendly platform for exploring the frontiers of data science and exchanging knowledge and experiences among thousands of scientists. He has been working as a member of CODATA EC since 2014, and making contributions for CODATA Strategy and its implementation.

With his extensive experience in national and international data activities and outstanding research on data science, scientific data management and sharing, he will continue to help CODATA carry out its mission, objectives and key initiatives as articulated in the Strategic Plan, especially make contributions on data policy, data management and data science.

This is the tenth in the series of short statements from candidates in the forthcoming CODATA Elections at the General Assembly to be held on 9-10 November in Gaborone, Botswana, following International Data Week. Ernie Boyko is a candidate for the CODATA Executive Committee as an ordinary member.  He was nominated by Canada, Israel, South Africa, TGFC.

Ernie Boyko is an agricultural economist with extensive experience in data development, data dissemination and research data management.

His wide experience at Canada’s national statistics agency, Statistics Canada, involved working at senior levels in a variety of areas including agriculture statistics, corporate planning, electronic dissemination, census operations and library and information services.

As an advocate for data access, his crowning achievement at Statistics Canada was the creation of the Data Liberation Initiative with Wendy Watkins from Carleton University.  This program allowed affordable access to all public microdata and aggregate files for the first time to post-secondary institutions.  It has recently celebrated its 25^th anniversary with 79 institutional members.    DLI has been cited internationally as a model program for statistical institutions.

Ernie was involved in several assignments with the World Bank and OECD’s PARIS21 projects.  This involved work in several African and Asian counties in data development for agriculture and dissemination and data management policies for statistical agencies.   He was able to put his Statistics Canada and international experience to use while spending a decade as an Adjunct Data Librarian at Carleton University where he taught the basics of research data management to faculty and graduate student researchers.

Mr. Boyko is a past president of the International Association for Social Science Information Services and Technology (IASSIST) an organization he has been part of for nearly 30 years.  This has given him exposure to the challenges of social science data services.  It was under this umbrella that he was part of a working group that developed a metadata standard, the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI).  DDI is now widely used as a standard for documenting research data.  In 2018, IASSIST presented Ernie with a lifetime achievement award for his work.

Ernie has been involved with CODATA for a decade, serving as an observer, a member and currently the Chair of the Canadian National Committee for CODATA.   As chair, he is leading a project that will realign the emphasis of the national committee with the new CODATA constitution’s focus on research data management.    The creation of the International Science Council through the merger of ICSU and the ISSC has led CODATA to focus more squarely on research data management and outreach.  The goal of the current work of the Canadian committee is to develop a process that will allow reporting on the status of RDM in Canada in a way that facilitates international comparisons.

His varied experience stands Ernie in good stead to help meet the challenges faced by CODATA in its transitions to being part of the International Science Council. It is hoped that Canada’s RDM project will be of interest to other countries, thus enabling a broader understanding of the state of research data for the benefit of science.

This is the ninth in the series of short statements from candidates in the forthcoming CODATA Elections at the General Assembly to be held on 9-10 November in Gaborone, Botswana, following International Data Week. Daisy Selematsela is a candidate for the CODATA Executive Committee as an ordinary member.  She was nominated by PASTD TG.

Daisy Selematsela holds a PhD and is Professor of Practice of Information and Knowledge Management of the University of Johannesburg. She has a combined 27 years’ experience in the Higher Education sector and within the National System of Innovation (NSI). She serves as mentor for emerging researchers in interdisciplinary areas and an external examiner for undergraduate and postgraduate students in Library, Information Science and Knowledge Management.

Daisy serves on a number scientific bodies and also as an editorial board member of the South African Journal of Library and Information Science (SAJLIS) and the Global Change Research Data Publishing and Repository and a reviewer of several programs.

She serves on a number of national boards and Advisory Councils. Internationally she is a member of Board of Directors of ORCID (represent EMEA – East Asia, Middle East and Africa) and the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR).

Daisy has served the then ICSU and CODATA on a number of forums, contributed to position papers, co-ordinated workshops, chaired conference sessions and made numerous local and international presentations on areas related to CODATA objectives. She has served CODATA in the following areas:

• Data Science Journal Review – corresponding Editor 2009
• Served as ex-officio member of the South African National Committee for CODATA for 11 years.
• World Data Centre on Biodiversity and Human Health prototype proposal and hosting;
• Executive member: International Council for Science Union (ICSU SCID) ad Hoc Committee on Information and Data in 2007.
• Chair: International Council for Science: Committee on Data for Science & Technology (ICSU: CODATA) Task Group on Data Sources for Sustainable Development in SADC 2007 -2011.
• Executive member: (ICSU EDC Panel) International Science Union World Data Centre Panel2008.
• Member: CODATA Task Group on Preservation of and Access to Scientific and Technical Data in/for/with Developing Countries. Co-chairs: CODATA – WDS joint subgroup 2011 to date.

She was part of the Founding and Executive Members of the International Data Forum (IDF) 2007-2010. Instrumental in the formulation of Statement on Open Access for grant funding; Statement on ORCID ID and Predatory Publishing.

She holds a PhD in Information Science from the University of Johannesburg; a Fellow of the Higher Education Resource Service for Women in Higher Education (HERS) South Africa and Bryn Mawr College in Philadelphia, USA. Acknowledged with the Knowledge Management Award in 2016 by the World Education Congress.

This is the eighth in the series of short statements from candidates in the forthcoming CODATA Elections at the General Assembly to be held on 9-10 November in Gaborone, Botswana, following International Data Week. Muliaro Wafula is a candidate for the CODATA Executive Committee as an ordinary member.  He was nominated by Kenya and Agriculture TG.

I am a Kenyan nationality who has served Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT) for 25 years. I am currently a member and the Chair of CODATA Kenya. I hold the following additional responsibilities:

1. Chair, Technical Advisory Board of the Africa Open Science Platform Project funded by the South African government’s department, Science and Technology (DST), the International Science Council (ISC) and CODATA. (http://africanopenscience.org.za/?p=230)
2. Member editorial board of the Data Science Journal (https://datascience.codata.org/);
3. Member editorial board of the African Journal of Food, Agriculture, Nutrition and Development;
4. Chair, Innovative Open Data and Visualization Sub-taskforce of the AFRICA-ai-JAPAN Project sponsored by JICA;
5. Chair, Training committee of the National Industrial Training Authority-Kenya (https://www.nita.go.ke/) ;
6. Member, committee of the United Nations SDGs Agricultural and Climate Change Pillars of Kenya.
7. Member, CODATA Data Policy Committee

I am currently the founder Director for the ICT Centre of Excellence and Open Data at JKUAT. I coordinate all ICT related Memorandum of Understanding between JKUAT and partners. I have served in the past as the ICT Director for 5 years and director of the Institute of Computer Science and Information Technology for 4 years.

I hold B.Sc. Science (Hons) (Kenyatta University), M.Sc Physics (University of Nairobi), M.Phil. Microelectronic Engineering and Semiconductor Physics (University of Cambridge –UK), Summer Doctoral Programme (Berkman Centre for Internet & Society/Oxford Internet Institute’s -Harvard University Law School), and PhD Information Technology (JKUAT).

I am a recipient of two IBM awards namely: the 2016 IBM Shared University Research Award on Open Data Cloud Project for JKUAT that has enabled JKUAT to be a frontier on building an open data platform for researchers in Africa, and the 2014 IBM MEA Award, for capacity building in Mobile Application development that enable JKUAT train and professionally certify a large number of application developers. I lead training on Big Data Analytics, Cyber Security, and Blockchain Technology.

I am professionally certified in various fields including Cyber Security, Mobile Application, ISO/IEC 27001:2005 Information Security Management System, Leadership and Management Capacity Development, Sage Accpac ERP Financial and Operations Management Systems, and ISO 9001:2000 on Quality Management Systems.

I am a fellow of the Computer Society of Kenya and the Cambridge Commonwealth Society. I have published a book see link at https://www.amazon.com/ICT-Policy-Strategies-Government-Sustainable/dp/3639515137  and several research papers in peer reviewed international journals. I have attended and participated in several data science, big data and open data trainings, workshops and conferences.

I am an Associate Professor of the Department of Computing at JKUAT and Director of the ICT Centre of Excellence and Open Data (iCEOD). As the director of iCEOD, accomplished the following key activities in line with CODATA objectives:

1. Development and implementation of the JKUAT Open Research Data (JORD) Policy. This policy is now regarded as a frontier in Kenya and a reference for other research institutions to spur data revolution in Kenya and the region;
2. Won the Kenya Open Data Champion Award 2017, thus promoting open science and data practices.
3. Orghanized and hosted an international Data, Information and Scientific Visualization Conference in August 2018, called VizAfrica 2018 http://vizsymposium.jkuat.ac.ke/
4. Designed and implementing a cloud-based value chain open data platform developed based on FAIR open data principles and standards in order to promote research data storage, preservation, sharing and reuse. The platform aims at:

1. Promoting conformity to the open data principles, policies and standards.
2. Linking and be linked to other open data platforms
3. Offering data analytic and visualization tools
4. Supporting and enable ICT Policies and strategies research for open development at postgraduate level.
5. Enabling use of research data to accelerate achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in Kenya and the region
6. Establishing a call centre
7. Creating an ecosystem of strictly research data.

The establishment of iCEOD played a leading role in getting JKUAT declared by the Kenyan Ministry of Higher Education Science and Technology, as the ICT Centre of Excellence for the Northern Corridor Integration Project (NCIP) see link http://www.nciprojects.org/ that involves Kenya, Uganda. Rwanda and Southern Sudan.

If elected as a member of committee of CODATA, I will continue to promote CODATA activities and goals. I will contribute to the strategy of increasing CODATA national membership through the Pan African University Institute of Basic Sciences, Technology and Innovation see link at http://www.jkuat.ac.ke/pauisti/  community that is hosted at my university JKUAT. Now that I am engaged in open data and data science research, and also having the experience of leading JKUAT to develop and implement both the open research data policy (JORD) and an open data platform, see link at https://opendata.jkuat.ac.ke/ , I am ready to share lessons learnt and possible best practices to be adopted through offering technical advice to CODATA community that need it. I am currently supervising postgraduate PhD students researching on open data and data science solutions towards achievement of SDGs in developing countries.

I am developing the Africa Open Science Framework that will guide African countries and institutions to develop open science polices. The Framework will be ready by November 2018 for launch during the International Data Week in Botswana.

This is the seventh in the series of short statements from candidates in the forthcoming CODATA Elections at the General Assembly to be held on 9-10 November in Gaborone, Botswana, following International Data Week. Barend Mons is a candidate for the CODATA Executive Committee as CODATA President.  He was nominated by USA.

CODATA: 2018-2022

Barend Mons

Vision: CODATA serving the global community as a global champion of machine-actionable data publishing, according to FAIR principles in a well coordinated ecosystem of global organisations

A phase transition in Science
Both science and innovation are in the process of a methodological transformation. Because of the unprecedented amount of data we deal with, we are in the midst of a significant landslide away from a closed, individual-privilege-patent- and ‘center of excellence’ based system towards a system that has to support fully distributed, collective human intelligence much more effectively.  But even more critically, a modern data science and innovation ecosystem should be able to maximise the use of powerful, distributed digital assistants.

The roughly ten million times increase of storage and compute power over the past three decades, accompanied by roughly a hundred thousand times decrease in storage costs, has finally brought us to a point where ‘ICT’ is frequently mis-conceptualised as a commodity. Consequently, we capture so much data and subsequently reveal such complex patterns in it, that the human mind is unable to make sense of these patterns anymore. That is…. without massive international collaborations and digital assistance. So, on top of the Internet for People, we now need and Internet for Machines, in which machine actionable data and services will play a central role.

A need for data stewardship
Unfortunately, our ability to deal responsibly with data as the principal first-phase output of the scientific process, has not kept pace with the generation and storage capabilities. The current reality is a glaring lack of expertise; a crippled practice of cottage-industry data stewardship; an almost complete lack of interoperability of data in domain silos; and a hopelessly outdated scholarly publication and reward system, which effectively prohibits open science and innovation.

Many reports have recently highlighted the unacceptable loss of valuable data, and the waste of time and effort as an estimated 70% of researcher time is spent on ‘data wrangling’.  Furthermore, the persistence of narrative publishing in formats solely meant for human consumption  is a nightmare for machine processing of results and data.  It amounts to a means of hiding the data behind pay walls, embedded and difficult to extract from figures and tables, with remote and volatile links to ‘supplementary data’, without proper metadata and provenance. This picture is even more gloomy as it is precisely the lack of access to an reusability of data that results in the emerging and well-documented reproducibility crisis in science.

Much of this lament is painfully familiar and has been made repeatedly with too little real impact for over two decades…

The role of mandated organisations such as CODATA
Data-focused organisations with a global mandate can play a major converging role in the decades to come. With its mandate from ISC (representing nearly 200 national members and the international scientific unions and associations), CODATA should be in a unique position to assist and guide where appropriate the transition to modern data stewardship for open science. It is high time for CODATA to become a global champion of machine-actionable data publishing, according to FAIR principles, supplemented with narrative for humans, and so to help ensure an optimal data substrate for modern, data-intensive and (thus) machine-assisted science and innovation. The emergence of open science, and the recent merger of the two parent councils, prompt a timely occasion to recalibrate what the role of CODATA during and after the landslide may be. As a servant of the science and innovation communities world-wide, CODATA has to, first of all, redefine its goals in the new data reality. This should be done in line with the several high level reports from the European Commission (such as the various reports and the -SWD-roadmap for the European Open Science Cloud) and from the United States (such as the consensus study Open Science by Design), while also taking into full account the simultaneous efforts in other continents including BRICS activities and efforts for open science in Africa and Latin America.  Next, CODATA needs to redefine its unique added value niche vis a vis other data related initiatives, such as the Research Data Alliance (RDA) and the Global Open FAIR (GO FAIR) initiative. These are relatively young organisations compared to CODATA but they enjoy rapid uptake in the community and in the turmoil associated with any landslide, there is confusion about the various roles they and CODATA play.

Multiple roles
The CODATA strategic plan 2013-2018 showed deep insight in the data revolution that was upon us even back then. However, the current rate of data production, and analysis, challenges has far surpassed even the boldest predictions at the time. Currently, in many scientific disciplines, the learning algorithm, frequently hyped as ‘artificial intelligence’ is now predominantly present in methodology. Contemporary science, even in disciplines where the other hype term ‘big data’ is not yet mainstream, increasingly relies on complex pattern recognition by powerful and self-learning algorithms, followed by human decision on ‘actionable knowledge’ emerging from ‘meaningful’ patterns. What we have seen in the past three years is a rapid development of machine-oriented initiatives such as the formulation of the FAIR principles (https://www.nature.com/articles/sdata201618), describing how data should be formulated, published and stewarded in a way that supports optimal reuse in open science and innovation for both machines and humans.

The Research Data Alliance (RDA) has also seen a remarkable growth pattern. Given the importance of these ‘data-driven science’ global movements, it is not surprising that RDA, GO FAIR and other organisations have arisen that address the opportunities and challenges of reusable data and services, each addressing different aspects and filling different, complementary niches in this tumultuous field. In fact, the time is now right to ensure that we create and support an efficient, mutually enforcing ecosystem of these organisations. That means staking out the appropriate ground for each, clarifying appropriate working space, synergies and eliminating unnecessary duplication. This vision includes clear definition of missions, comprising both bottom-up and more top-down approaches where appropriate, and focusing our efforts.

A vision of mutually enforcing collaboration
The following section represents my initial thinking in this area, sharpened by many discussions with leading colleagues in this field:

The oldest international coordinating organisation in the data space is CODATA, which has been in existence for more than 50 years. CODATA, is a committee of ISC, after the merger of the International Council of Science and the International Social Science Council. ISC has a second data related initiative, the World Data System (WDS), which is ten years old as an International Programme Office (but has roots in the International Geophysical Year of 1958). In addition to these ISC-affiliated organisations, the Research Data Alliance (RDA) is a five-year-old grass roots organisation mainly supported by the EC, the US NSF and NIST, and the Australian Department of Innovation. RDA has rapidly developed into a large (> 7000 individual members) organisation that serves a crucial public role, namely bottom up consensus building about approaches, protocols and standards in expert communities. The EC and the EU member states have been particularly active in the data space, also conceiving and supporting the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) Initiative. The supporting GO FAIR initiative (Global Open FAIR), initiated as a kick start approach for the EOSC by the governments of The Netherlands, Germany and France, is rapidly growing into a practical network or existing networks of excellence in early implementation of community adopted approaches, protocols, standards and training. These four key organisations (CODATA, WDS, RDA and GO FAIR) are all international and cross-disciplinary in scope, mandated and poised to support the global science enterprise including pan-European, and global, domain specific research infrastructures and e-infrastructures. To better support global science, I propose investigating ways to better coordinate and differentiate the work space for these four and perhaps other more disciplinary and regional science data organisations.  In the spirit of community-wide consensus I have discussed these issues for several months now with the leadership of CODATA, RDA and GO FAIR and the following section represents my resulting view.

A triangular shape
The key roles of CODATA, RDA and GO FAIR are distinct, complementary and synergistic. They are depicted in the triangle model below. Like any model, it will always fall short to describe reality in all aspects and dimensions, but it is a way to visualise the various complementary roles. It should be stated as a preamble that in many concrete actions, the roles of the three organisations will overlap, such as for instance in training and education, and advocacy for best practices. Therefore, the triangle model is also meant visualise how the tasks following from the focus described at the corners of the triangle dovetail when ever appropriate. With the recent establishment of the ISC, complementarity between the three organisations becomes even more pertinent. It should also be emphasised that each of the organisations has additional activities outside the scope of this collaborative structure.

RDA has a principal bottom up working mechanism centred around interest and working groups that address, and where possible solve, intellectual challenges associated with solutions needed around research data in the broadest sense (also data analytics services, software and basic compute issues are in scope). This is done in community driven manner and leads to recommended solutions and designs. Obviously, these have to be tested for feasibility in practice, which can be done anywhere, but GO FAIR has a strong mandate and basis in a growing number of so called GO FAIR Implementation Networks to rapidly test recommended solutions. These are expert communities with ‘critical mass’ (community leadership) and impact that can implement proposed solutions (by RDA or others) in practice. This also provides an early testing ground of such applications (in social change, training or actual module building for the Internet for FAIR data and services). Obviously, many key stakeholders in the community play a role in RDA working groups and in the organisation as well as in GO FAIR implementation networks.

CODATA is mandated by ISC as the international body for research data in the broadest sense, focusing on data policies, data science and data skills and education. Despite being a lean organisation, CODATA is involved in various implementation activities on interoperability, capacity building, training and dissemination,

but has also played a crucial role in the development of key data policies and principles (including those of the OECD, GEO and the ISC endorsed ‘Open Data in a Big Data World’ that have effectively become ‘soft law’ for the scientific community.

In continuous and structural collaboration, the three organisations, having already established very good practical working relationships and participating in each other’s activities whenever appropriate, can collectively serve the community by providing organised and emerging consensus building and design, coordinated early expert implementation and broad adoption of best practices. This is all pre-competitive, but can form the basis for certification of providers in the EOSC, US, BRICS and beyond.

What is my motivation to serve as CODATA president for the 2018-2022 term?
Being involved in the early days of RDA and (GO) FAIR, I have seen many critical decision points where the development of an effective ecosystem for open, FAIR science and innovation could have gone astray.

Risks for science in the data intensive age include (re)centralisation, recidivist monopoly formation, exclusion of the private sector (critical for innovation and scaling), defending powerhouses built in the transition phase, and further propagation of ‘yet more standards’. In addition, there are many misperceptions around frequently used hype terms such as ‘open’ (versus FAIR), AI, Big Data, Data Sharing, Open Access (articles) versus Open Science, Linked (Open) Data, Semantic Modelling etcetera. It is therefore imperative to support global, community compliant consensus building on commonly accepted definitions of these central concepts. CODATA, in close collaboration with RDA, GO FAIR and others, could prevent many of these potential mistakes and play a key intellectual leadership role in the transition phase described here.

As CODATA President I would like to work with the core staff in this multi-organisational ecosystem and ensure that CODATA will have a solid, specific, recognised, and effective role.  I was the organiser of the foundational meeting in 2014 where the FAIR principles were conceived, the Chair of the HLEG of the EC on the EOSC and I currently co-lead the GO FAIR International support and coordination offices, with branches in the Netherlands, Germany and France. I have extensive connections to RDA, and serve on the US National Academy of Sciences Board for Research Data and Information (which is the US National Committee for CODATA).  If I were also to help lead CODATA, I would concentrate on an ambassadorial role for the joint ecosystem of the various organisations as summarised in the triangle model above, and thus be in a good position and interested in using these relationships to bring RDA, GO FAIR and CODATA closer together, as well as determining the role of WDS in the new reality, each with their specific and complementary expertise networks, thus creating greater strength to the common good.

For all this to happen, it will be of critical importance that each of the supporting organisations is mandated and properly funded (although at the leanest possible level) to serve the science and innovation communities, without ever competing for the same funds. They should focus on those supra-level tasks that never make it to the top of the priority list of individual researchers and innovators.

If you agree that the time has come to better coordinate and possibly consolidate the international organisations in this important area, and appropriate mandates and resources to achieve this goal will be put into place, I would be happy to serve you as CODATA President.