The CODATA Secretariat will be taking a break for the end of the year holidays. We would like to wish you a pleasant and relaxing holiday, however you may be celebrating it.
2021 was another ‘interesting’ year! As a global organisation, our activities have been largely virtual for some time. There are ways in which the circumstances of the pandemic have accentuated this, but we do look forward to the times when we will again be able to hold some in person meetings! Fingers crossed for International Data Week in Seoul, 20-23 June 2022.
CODATA Activities and Achievements in 2021
An Overview of CODATA’s Activities and Achievements in 2021 https://doi.org/10.5281/
Advancing the Decadal Programme
There have been some major achievements. Good progress has been made in our Decadal Programme for ISC, exploring core issues of interoperability, in domain and cross-domain settings. This includes representation of units of measurement, FAIR vocabularies, cross-domain metadata and a set of cross-domain case studies. CODATA launched the Global Open Science Cloud initiative to encourage cooperation, alignment and interoperability between emerging Open Science platforms and commons. In parallel, the CODATA Secretariat is supporting the Open Science Cloud Executives’ Roundtable (OSCER) which will meet periodically to exchange knowledge and foster convergence.
The Year of Open Science
These are timely initiatives. In November, the UNESCO General Conference approved the Recommendation on Open Science (for which the CODATA Executive Director was vice chair of the Expert Advisory Committee). This is significant: the global UN body for science and assembled Member States, speaking for the scientific communities and system, now unambiguously recognises Open Science, supported by FAIR data and services, as THE means of doing research for the 21st century. The Recommendation is a call to action and a lot remains to be done, including support for Open Science and FAIR practices in the global south through initiatives such as the African Open Science Platform.
In 2021, CODATA held (in collaboration with WDS), a virtual SciDataCon with over 40 sessions and more than 1300 participants. Our virtual General Assembly appointed a new Executive Committee, and approved eight new Task Groups and two new Working Groups.
Looking Forward to 2022!
As we wish you the best for the end of the year and a successful and prosperous 2022, we would like to draw your attention to the following activities and dates.
The CODATA International Data Policy Committee is looking for a new chair: Call for Nominations and Applications: Chair, CODATA International Data Policy Committee – DEADLINE Monday 17 January 2022
Call for Sessions SciDataCon / International Data Week 2022, Deadline Monday 14 February 2022: The call for sessions for the SciDataCon part of International Data Week, Seoul, Republic of Korea, 20-23 June 2022 is open, with a deadline of 14 February. This will be a major, hybrid event for the global data community to consider themes around ‘Data to Improve our World’: timely in the context of the pandemic, the climate crisis, the need to advance the SDGs and the context of Open Science!
Currently in planning are a CIPM Digital SI and CODATA DRUM Summit on Units of Measurement, an initiative to broaden our activities on FAIR vocabularies with a number of Scientific Unions and representatives of research domains (as recommended at the General Assembly), and the Second FAIR Convergence Symposium, being planned with the FAIR Digital Objects Conference for Leiden, towards the end of the year.
It remains just for me to repeat my best wishes, on behalf of the CODATA Secretariat! I look forward to working with you to advance Open Science and FAIR data in 2022!
Simon Hodson, Executive Director