I was in the Hague yesterday (Monday 20 January) for a meeting with DANS and the 3TU Data.Centrum.  It was a generously accorded opportunity for me to communicate plans for the future of CODATA and discuss membership.  I have worked a lot with Dutch colleagues over the past few years in the context of Knowledge Exchange and I think some inspiring work is going on in the Netherlands.  In particular, I am impressed by the partnership of these two organisations in Research Data Netherlands and also in the way DANS and 3TU have aimed to respond to the Riding the Wave report to develop a partnership and a federated data infrastructure based upon the distribution of back office and front office functions.

The occasion for this visit was an excellent symposium by DANS visiting fellows, Andrew Treloar @atreloar and Herbert van der Sompel @hvdsomp, on Riding the Wave and The Scholarly Archive of the Future.  The joint presentation, and the structured discussions, were the result of ten days of dedicated thinking and working together.

@atreloar presents dimensions of change in scholarly practice and communications.

Andrew and Herbert took as a starting point four functions of research communication suggested by Rosendaal and Geurts in 1997: registration, certification, awareness and archiving.  They analysed changes in each of these functions and came up with a typology characterising dimensions of change in scholarly practice and communications.  The key features of these changes are an increasing variety in the object of communication and a disaggregation of the processes that comprise communication – particularly of those, perhaps, that perform the registration, ‘certification’ and awareness functions in the Rosendaal/Geurts typology.

@hvdsomp presents the emerging ‘recording’ and ‘archiving’ infrastructure

The implications of this for ‘recording’ and ‘archiving’ infrastructure were represented in a diagram.  The challenge for data archives is to interface and interoperate effectively with new, emerging, disaggregated systems for scholarly communication, filtering, and annotation – while retaining (and sustaining) the necessary archiving functions.

Andrew and Herbert were clear that this work was ‘thinking in progress’.  Indeed, I think that was what made the event so interesting.  It was genuinely refreshing to engage with some relatively unhindered and untethered thinking.  Moreover, it was imaginative and bold for the event to be organised in such a way, in the conviction that colleagues from DANS, 3TU Data.Centrum and others involved in data archiving need to imagine the archive of the future and would benefit in this from the insights of invited experts who had been given time to think…

This post is by Bob Chen, Director of CIESIN (Center for International Earth Science Information Network), Columbia University, former Secretary General of CODATA and current co-chair of the GEO Data Sharing Working Group.

Representatives of more than 80 governments and 100 participating organizations are gathering in Geneva this week to renew their commitment to GEO, the Group on Earth Observations, a voluntary intergovernmental initiative launched in 2005, and to agree on plans for the next decade. A key aspect of GEO has been to widen the consensus on the need for open sharing of Earth Observation and related spatial data and to implement data sharing mechanisms within GEOSS, the Global Earth Observing System of Systems.

CODATA has played a leadership role in GEO’s data sharing efforts since 2006. The GEOSS 10-year implementation plan adopted in 2005 had outlined a set of Data Sharing Principles (DSPs) for data sharing across the GEO community, but translating these principles into practice required agreement on terminology, consensus on processes and procedures, and inputs from experts on legal and intellectual property issues. As an interdisciplinary committee of the International Council for Science (ICSU), which was and still is a GEO Participating Organization, CODATA volunteered to lead the initial data sharing task and organized an expert meeting at its 2006 CODATA Conference in Beijing. In 2007, CODATA led development of a white paper that reviewed past experience with data sharing principles and policies and drafted specific guidelines for implementing the DSPs. Based in part on these efforts, the 2007 Ministerial Summit in Cape Town affirmed the need to reach a consensus on the implementation of the DSPs by the next Ministerial in 2010.

The 2008 GEO-V Plenary in Bucharest elevated the original GEO data sharing task to a higher-level Task Force with a mix of governmental and Participating Organization members. CODATA continued to represent ICSU as one of the co-chairs of the Data Sharing Task Force, and played a key role in revising the proposed implementation guidelines. In September 2009, a version of the white paper, Toward Implementation of the Global Earth Observation System of Systems Data Sharing Principles, authored by Paul Uhlir, myself, Joanne Gabrynowicz, and Katleen Janssen, was simultaneously published in the CODATA Data Science Journal and the Journal of Space Law. The paper provided detailed justification for the GEOSS Implementation Guidelines that were subsequently accepted at the GEO-VI Plenary in Washington DC in November 2009.

Recognizing that implementation guidelines were only a partial step towards implementation of the GEOSS DSPs, GEO recognized that more specific actions needed to be taken by GEO collectively, by individual Members and Participating Organizations, and by specific GEOSS tasks and cross-cutting activities to move towards full and open access to key data within GEOSS. The Task Force therefore developed a detailed Action Plan that was adopted at the GEO-VII Plenary in Beijing in 2010. A key element of the Action Plan was for GEO to create the GEOSS Data-CORE—the GEOSS Data Collection of Open Resources for Everyone—consisting of a distributed pool of documented datasets, contributed by the GEO community on the basis of full and open unrestricted access and at no more than the cost of reproduction and distribution. The Action Plan also identified a range of other implementation actions and established a Data Sharing Working Group (DSWG) to continue the work of the Task Force.

CODATA continues to play a lead role in the DSWG, serving as one of six co-chairs, contributing substantial expertise on issues such as legal interoperability and data sharing frameworks, and helping to organize side events and other supporting activities. With the end of the first 10-year implementation period in sight, and in light of rapidly growing recognition by governments and the wider community of the benefits of open data sharing, there is increasing awareness within the GEO community to the potential not only to further implement the existing GEOSS DSPs but also to expand the range of open data sharing efforts across a range of societal benefit areas.

The DSWG has organized a side event at the GEO-X Plenary that is highlighting a number of new data sharing initiatives and improvements in capacity for data sharing at national, regional, and global levels. Simon Hodson and I are also members of the ICSU delegation at the GEO-X Plenary. I will be working with Simon to report on the side event in more detail and on outcomes of the GEO-X Plenary and Ministerial Summit related to data sharing in upcoming blog entries.

Under the name SciDataCon 2014, the next CODATA International Conference will take place in New Delhi, India on 2-5 November 2014.

Research data is at the core of the scientific endeavour, but several cultural and technological challenges are still preventing the research community from realising the full benefits. The emerging cultures of data sharing and publication, open access to, and reuse of data are the positive signs of an evolving research environment.

Under the umbrella of the International Council for Science (ICSU), the Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA) and the World Data System (WDS) are supporting and encouraging these positive changes by actively promoting effective data policies and good data management practices in the research community, to produce better science, which ultimately benefits society.

As a major contribution to this effort, the two organizations have decided to co-sponsor and organize a high profile international biennial conference on scientific research data. SciDataCon will provide a unique platform bringing together international experts and practitioners in data management and technologies, researchers from the natural sciences and social sciences, research funders, and policy makers.

The sustainability challenges facing society today cannot be solved without multidisciplinary and transdiscplinary research on global sustainability, which requires the use of data across scientific disciplines and domains and from international sources. The effectiveness and credibility of this research will rely on the availability to the research community of quality-assessed and interoperable datasets.

In order to facilitate the work of international research undertakings—including the Future Earth research programme on global sustainability launched by ICSU and its partners in 2014— and amplify the message of like-minded global data initiatives promoting data sharing and interoperability—including the Group on Earth Observations and the Research Data Alliance—SciDataCon 2014 will highlight the theme of Data haring and Integration for Global Sustainability.

With high-level keynotes, four parallel sessions and a stimulating poster session, SciDataCon is conceived as a focussed—yet inclusive—conference to address major issues in global data management. The scientific programme will be designed by an International Scientific Programme Committee with innovative online consultation and input from research and data communities worldwide.

We are pleased to invite you to contribute to this exciting conference planned on 2–5 November 2014 in New Delhi, India and hosted by the Indian National Science Academy.  More information, calls for papers and invitations to participate in discussions around the themes of the conference will appear soon at http://www.scidatacon2014.org

The Data Citation Synthesis Group has released a draft Declaration of Data Citation Principles and invites comment.

This has been a very interesting and positive collaborative process and has involved a number of groups and committed individuals. Encouraging the practice of data citation, it seems to me, is one of the key steps towards giving research data its proper place in the literature.

As the preamble to the draft principles states:

Sound, reproducible scholarship rests upon a foundation of robust, accessible data. For this to be so in practice as well as theory, data must be accorded due importance in the practice of scholarship and in the enduring scholarly record. In other words, data should be considered legitimate, citable products of research. Data citation, like the citation of other evidence and sources, is good research practice.

In support of this assertion, and to encourage good practice, we offer a set of guiding principles for data citation.

Please do comment on these principles. We hope that with community feedback and support, a finalised set of principles can be widely endorsed and adopted.

Discussion on a variety of lists is welcome, of course. However, if you want the Synthesis Group to take full account of your views, please be sure to post your comments on the discussion forum.

Some notes and observations on the background to these principles

I would like to add here some notes and observations on the genesis of these principles. As has been widely observed there have been a number of groups and interested parties involved in exploring the principles of data citation for a number of years. Mentioning only some of the sources and events that affected my own thinking on the matter, there was the 2007 Micah Altman and Gary King article, in DLib, which offered ‘A Proposed Standard for the Scholarly Citation of Quantitative Data’ and Toby Green’s OECD White Paper ‘We need publishing standards for datasets and data tables’ in 2009. Micah Altman and Mercè Crosas organised a workshop at Harvard in May 2011 on Data Citation Principles. Later the same year, the UK Digital Curation Centre published a guide to citing data in 2011.

The CODATA-ICSTI Task Group on Data Citation Standards and Practices (co-chaired by Christine Borgman, Jan Brase and Sara Callaghan) has been in existence since 2010. In collaboration with the US National CODATA Committee and the Board on Research Data and Information, a major workshop was organised in August 2011, which was reported in ‘For Attribution: Developing Data Attribution and Citation Practices and Standards’.

The CODATA-ICSTI Task Group then started work on a report covering data citation principles, eventually entitled ‘Out of Cite, Out of Mind’ – drafts were circulated for comment in April 2013 and the final report was released in September 2013.

Following the first ‘Beyond the PDF’ meeting in Jan 2011 participants produced the Force11 Manifesto ‘Improving Future Research Communication and e-Scholarship’ which places considerable weight on the availability of research data and the citation of those data in the literature. At ‘Beyond the PDF II’ in Amsterdam, March 2013, a group comprising Mercè Crosas, Todd Carpenter, David Shotton and Christine Borgman produced ‘The Amsterdam Manifesto on Data Citation Principles’. In the very same week, in Gothenburg, an RDA Birds of a Feather group was discussing the more specific problem of how to support, technologically, the reliable and efficient citation of dynamically changing or growing datasets and subsets thereof. And the broader issues of the place of data and research publication were being considered in the ICSU World Data Service Working Group on Data Publication. This group has, in turn, formed the basis for an RDA Interest Group.  Oooffff!

How great a thing is collaboration?

From June 2013, as the Force11 Group was preparing its website and activities to take forward the work on the Amsterdam Manifesto, calls came in from a number of sources for these various groups and initiatives to coordinate and collaborate. This was admirably well-received and from July the ‘Data Citation Synthesis Group’ had come into being with an agreed mission statement:

The data citation synthesis group is a cross-team committee leveraging the perspectives from the various existing initiatives working on data citation to produce a consolidated set of data citation principles (based on the Amsterdam Manifesto, the CODATA and other sets of principles provided by others) in order to encourage broad adoption of a consistent policy for data citation across disciplines and venues. The synthesis group will review existing efforts and make a set of recommendations that will be put up for endorsement by the organizations represented by this synthesis group.

The synthesis group will produce a set of principles, illustrated with working examples, and a plan for dissemination and distribution. This group will not be producing detailed specifications for implementation, nor focus on technologies or tools.

As has been noted elsewhere , the group comprised 40 individuals and brought together a large number of organisations and initiatives. What followed over the summer was a set of weekly calls to discuss and align the principles. I must say, I thought these were admirably organised and benefitted considerably from participants’ efforts to prepare documents comparing the various groups’ statements. The face-to-face meeting of the group, in which a lot of detailed discussion to finalise the draft was undertaken, was hosted (with a funding contribution from CODATA) at the US National Academies of Science between the 2nd RDA Plenary and the DataCite Summer Meeting (which CODATA also co-sponsored). It has been intellectually stimulating and a real pleasure to contribute to these discussions and to witness so many informed and engaged people bashing out these issues.

The principles developed by the Synthesis Group are now open for comment and I urge as many people, researchers, editors and publishers as possible who believe that data has a place in scholarly communications to comment on them and, in due course, to endorse them and put them into practice.

Are we finally at the cusp of real change in practice? Will we now start seeing the practice of citing data sources become more and more widespread? It’s soon to say for sure, but I hope these principles, and the work on which they build, have got us to a stage where we can start really believing the change is well underway.

CODATA, the ICSU Committee on Data for Science and Technology, invites proposals for new Task Groups and offers existing Task Groups the opportunity to renew their activity.

Task Groups have been established to support CODATA’s overall mission to strengthen international science for the benefit of society by promoting improved scientific and technical data management and use.  More specifically, Task Groups must remain relevant in a fast changing environment and contribute to the realisation of CODATA’s strategic objectives and activities, as articulated in the CODATA Strategic Plan, 2013-18.  For Task Groups seeking to renew their activities for a further two years, a strong case must be made for the ongoing benefits of this activity, for well-conceived and valuable future objectives as well as part achievements.  Information about existing CODATA Task Groups is available on the CODATA website.

Submissions should be made on the appropriate form for New Task Groups Proposals (CODATA TG New 2014-Form-v04-Final) or for Task Groups Renewal Proposals (CODATA TG Renewal 2014-Form-v01-Final).

Details of how proposals will be evaluated, the responsibilities of Task Groups and how CODATA supports Task Groups are provided at below and in the covering documentation to the proposal form.  The submission process is as follows.

Preliminary Submissions due 14 February 2014

Task Groups seeking to renew activities are invited to submit draft proposals for comment by the CODATA Executive Committee.  Such draft proposals should be submitted on appropriate form to Simon Hodson, CODATA Executive Director no later than 14 February 2014.  Feedback from the Executive Committee will be provided no later than 28 March 2014.  The intention of this process is to encourage the alignment of final proposals with the CODATA Strategic Plan.  Although not obligatory, groups intended to submit Task Group proposals are strongly encouraged to take advantage of this lightweight opportunity for feedback and to submit a draft, even if incomplete, so long as provides enough clear information for the Executive Committee to give considered feedback.

Final Submissions due 30 April 2014

Please submit the final, completed proposal by e-mail to Simon Hodson, CODATA Executive Director no later than 30 April 2014.

Draft and final submissions should be sent to Simon Hodson, CODATA Executive Director at:

Proposals are peer reviewed and also assessed by the Executive Committee.  On this basis the Executive Committee will make recommendations to the 29th CODATA General Assembly, to be held in New Delhi, 6-7 November 2014.

This message is sent on behalf of CODATA President, Huadong Guo; Secretary General, Sara Graves; Treasurer, John Broome; Vice-Presidents Takashi Gojibori and Fedor Kuznetsov, and the CODATA Executive Committee.

Further Information: The CODATA Strategic Plan

The CODATA Strategic Plan comprises three areas of activity:

1. Policy and Institutional Frameworks for Data: CODATA will take a lead in defining a policy agenda for scientific data, addressing national, international and diverse scientific contexts.  CODATA has established an international, expert Data Policy Committee to lead this activity.
2. Frontiers in data science and technology: CODATA will stimulate and coordinate work in key frontiers of data science and interdisciplinary application areas.  Working with a range of partners, CODATA will initiate a series of international workshops and research activities addressing these themes.  CODATA will also expand its international education and training activities including curriculum development in data science and our initiative to encourage Early Career Data Scientists.
3. Data strategies for international science: CODATA will support international scientific programmes, including Future Earth, to address data management needs, particularly the policies, processes, standards and technology necessary so that the scientific objectives are met and the data legacy is assured.

As part of its Proposal, the candidate Task Group should state clearly how its work will contribute to the realisation of one or more of these objectives.

Participation by scientists from around the world as members of the Task Group and in Task Group activities is strongly encouraged.  Particular attention should be given to gender balance, the participation of early career scientists, and appropriate representation from developing countries.

How CODATA Assesses and Selects Task Group Proposals

Proposals are peer reviewed and are also assessed by the Executive Committee.

The criteria used include the following:

• The contribution to CODATA’s mission and objectives as laid out in the Strategic Plan;
• The scientific merit of the proposed work and its value to the scientific and/or technical community;
• The feasibility of the workplan and the merits of the deliverables proposed;
• The existence of appropriate collaboration with other organizations of groups, ensuring the proposed work does not duplicate other activities;
• The expertise and appropriateness of the Task Group membership, including gender balance, the participation of early career scientists, and appropriate representation from developing countries;
• The existence of other likely sources of funding and support.

On the basis of the peer review and its own assessment, the Executive Committee makes recommendations to the General Assembly.

Proposers will be required to give either a presentation or poster at the General Assembly.  Existing Task Groups requesting renewal may not use CODATA funds in order to attend the General Assembly.  The presentation or poster may be given by a CODATA Member Delegate.  The General Assembly takes this presentation and the recommendations of the Executive Committee into account when voting to approve or reject the proposal.

How CODATA Supports Task Groups

CODATA Task Groups are peer reviewed, vetted by the Executive Committee and approved by the General Assembly: this carries with it the endorsement and authority of the international CODATA community.  At the discretion of the Executive Committee, CODATA Task Groups are eligible for modest funding support.  It is intended that seed funding and the endorsement of the CODATA community will help the Task Group find other support for its activities.  Task Groups will be provided with a space on the new CODATA website and tools to help collaboration.  Task Groups are expected to liaise regularly with the Secretariat and to use the new CODATA website to communicate their work and achievements.  CODATA Task Groups are provided with a Liaison from the Executive Committee.  The Liaison is considered an ex officio member of their Task Groups and, as such, receives copies of all correspondence and outputs.  The Liaison is in a position to provide expert advice and a link with the wider CODATA community in order to benefit the activities of the Task Group.

Responsibilities of CODATA Task Groups

CODATA Task Groups are expected to:

1. Contribute to the realisation of the CODATA Strategic Plan and CODATA’s overall mission;
2. Produce tangible public outputs (e.g. reports, white papers, publications, data collections, technical proposals etc) that contribute to the realisation of these objectives;
3. Help keep information about the TG and its activities on the CODATA website up to date;
4. Work with the Executive Director and Secretariat to communicate outputs and activities, including contributing material for blog posts and newsletters;
5. Take advantage of the Executive Committee Liaison for expert advice and links to the wider CODATA community;
6. Provide two progress reports (after 12 and 20 months).

A guest post from Alex de Sherbinin, CIESIN (Center for International Earth Science Information Network), Columbia University

I had the privilege of representing the CODATA Global Roads Data Development Task Group at the recently completed Global Geospatial Conference (4-8 November) at the UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) conference center in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The conference, which had about 500 participants, was organized by the Global Spatial Data Infrastructure Association (GSDI) and Environmental Information Systems for Africa (EIS-Africa).

A lot of talent from Africa was on display in the plenary and breakout sessions, with papers addressing land cover change, conflict prevention systems involving a combination of SMS text and geospatial technologies, geospatial education, and spatial data infrastructure development, among many other topics. Rwanda is one country that has made major investments in ICT and spatial data. Apparently each school in the country has at least one computer connected to the internet, and it is also the site of a geospatial reasoning education pilot test program with collaborators from Rochester Institute of Technology and the National University of Rwanda.

My primary purpose in attending was to make African colleagues aware of the availability of the Global Roads Open Access Data Set (gROADS) version 1 data release, which includes improved roads data for many countries in Africa, and to present work completed under the auspices of the Task Group on roads data development methodologies. These include the compilation of best available public domain data, digitization and semi-automated extraction of roads from remote sensing imagery, field based mapping using PDAs/smart phones and global positioning systems (GPSes), and crowd sourcing on the Internet.

At the end of the presentation I made a pitch for open data, meaning data that is free of restrictions on dissemination and use. The paper was well received and further conversations with UNECA and others at the conference revealed additional roads data sources for a gROADS version 2. I was particularly gratified to learn that the Democratic Republic of Congo has put their entire roads data set online free of restrictions. In terms of follow up, colleagues at UNECA’s Geoinformation Section expressed interest in collaborating with the CODATA Task Group, and the task group will be following up on that and other leads for possible funding.

Geospatial data and technologies are evolving rapidly, and a number of major software companies held sessions describing new products. I attended all or part of sessions featuring Esri’s ArcGIS online, Google Map Engine, and Intergraph’s range of spatial products. After a plenary talk by a Google Maps representative, a national mapping agency (NMA) representative asked pointedly if there would still be a role for NMAs in the future. Later in the conference, Dave Coleman, the GSDI President, stated that much like people begin to think that eggs come from the supermarket, many also think that maps come from Google. But the reality is of course that those data still need to be produced somewhere, ensuring an important role for NMAs and other data developers.

Several talks and plenary presentations addressed the “mobile revolution”, in which map information is available on hand held devices and smart phones for use anywhere. Africa has bypassed the old style infrastructure of land lines, and now a surprising proportion of the population has cell phones and smart phones. A wide range of spatial data collection is now taking place on smart phones equipped with data entry software (such as that available from FormHub). Two countries in Africa – South Africa and Nigeria – also have remote sensing satellites. So these are exciting days indeed for data development in Africa.

Beyond the conference venue, I found myself reflecting on the dizzying pace of change in Addis and other major cities in Africa. The Chinese are building a new light rail system and residential and office blocks are rising everywhere. Conference presenters mentioned that African economies have among the most rapid rates of growth anywhere in the world and overseas investors are flocking there. Land grabbing for commercial agriculture is taking place in many countries, a relatively new phenomenon and one that promises to accelerate migration to the continent’s cities. I commented to more than one person that as a New Yorker, I feel like I am living in a sleepy backwater by comparison!

In closing, I would like to thank CODATA for the opportunity to travel to the conference, my Task Group colleagues Sives Govandar (EIS-Africa) and Harlan Onsrud (GSDI) for organizing an excellent conference, and our Ethiopian colleagues for their hospitality. A crowning moment was watching Harlan Onsrud break the ice at the closing banquet by perfectly mirroring the dance moves of a gyrating Ethiopian dancer. Before long everyone was on the dance floor enjoying themselves!

I have now been Executive Director of CODATA for very nearly three months.  The first CODATA Newsletter to be produced during my time in this role is now available.  The Newsletter pays tribute to my predecessor, Kathleen Cass; it announces Out of Cite, Out of Mind: The Current State of Practice, Policy, and Technology for the Citation of Data, a report from the CODATA-ICSTI Task Group on Data Citation Standards and Practices; and it reports on recent activities of the Executive Committee and the CODATA Task Groups.

The first three months have been very busy, and I intend to provide some more reflections on this time.  September and October are normally a time of year filled with conferences and workshops – this year has been no different and has given me a chance to talk about and discuss CODATA, its mission and activities, at a number of different events.

I gave a presentation with the title ‘Research data management and UK funding policies’ at the International Union of Crystallography’s (IUCr) COMCIFs Crystallographic Information and Data Management Symposium on Sunday 25 August – though I was also able to talk a bit about CODATA. The slides and recording are available.

On 9-10 Sept I attended the euroCRIS Strategic Seminar on Metadata in Research Information Systems. euroCRIS is, of course, a strategic partner of CODATA.  I had been asked to speak about new requirements for dataset metadata. I focused on new developments in data publication and also highlighted standards (e.g. DDI in social science, CIF in crystallography, ISAtab in life sciences) that, although not new, are significant in this context for paying a great deal of attention to capturing research method and provenance, rather than just describing the data output.  The slides from the meeting are available online.

Later that week, on 12 Sept, I participated in a panel session on data publishing at the ALPSP (Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers) International Conference. The panel was organised by Fiona Murphy of Wiley and was entitled Data Publishing: not the why, but the how (and then what?). The panel included Kerstin Lehnert (Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, director of IEDA, Integrated Earth Data Applications) and Anthony Brookes (Data to Knowledge, University of Leicester). The presentation and audio are available. The session seemed to garner a lot of interest and there have been nice write-ups in Research Information and on the ALPSP blog.

After attending the Research Data Alliance Plenary meeting in DC on 18-19 September, I gave a remote presentation and participated in a discussion about International CODATA’s activities and plans with the 9th Meeting of the Board on Research Data and Information.  I had a similar opportunity to speak about the new CODATA Strategic Plan at the annual meeting of the Group of European Members of ICSU.

I have also been contributing to events organised by a couple of European projects. On 25-6 September, I presented at a workshop organised by the EUDAT Project on Data Availability and Access Policies. The report on the workshop is being prepared and will be made available soon. This led to participation in a follow-up workshop session at the EUDAT Conference on 28-30 October in Rome. Through working groups EUDAT will be looking at data policies, data management planning and licensing issues for their consortium – and this is an area in which CODATA and the CODATA Data Policy Committee may contribute.

In these presentations, I have been pursuing some thoughts about the evolution and development of data policies and above all the importance of encouraging journal editorial boards, learned societies and International Scientific Unions – as bodies that can be said to represent the views of researchers in a given discipline – to develop data policies and recommendations regarding data availability, licensing, standards and infrastructure. These were themes that I also addressed in a presentation – in French – given at the Journées de FRÉDOC.

Finally, for now, I participated in a workshop organised by the SIM4RDM project.The workshop aimed to ensure that the funding and evaluation frameworks developed by the project meet the needs of the various Research Data Management (RDM) stakeholders – speakers were asked to make suggestions for how the Frameworks might be tested and validated in collaborative activities. CODATA National Committees, comprised of appropriate stakeholders might find the project outputs of interest for considering national RDM development and interventions.

I has been a busy couple of months!  I hope some of these links are of interest.

This blog is for and about the activities of the international CODATA community.

CODATA is:

• An international community and network of expertise on research data issues.
• An influential and authoritative voice in national and international policy regarding scientific data management.
• A focal point for international, cross-disciplinary collaboration and communication on key scientific data issues.

So on this blog you will be able to find out about CODATA’s Data Policy Committee and our activities to help define an international policy agenda for scientific data; about initiatives to push the frontiers of data science (through an international workshop series, our Task Groups, Special Activities, biannual conference and our Data Science Journal); and, about our advocacy and support for data issues in international scientific programmes like Future Earth.

A notable feature of this blog will be guest posts from the CODATA community, from expert data scientists working on a range of fascinating projects.  Otherwise, posts will be written by Simon Hodson, Executive Director of CODATA.

We look forward to seeing you soon!