Community Engagement Steering Group (CESG)

Natasha Simons is Director, National Coordination, for the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC). She leads a large, talented team of Program Managers and Subject Matter Experts contributing to deliver ARDC’s strategic Research Data Commons initiatives. Based at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Natasha is passionate about bringing out the best in people and creating high performing teams. She has a high international profile in the area of research data infrastructure and enjoys collaborating to solve common data challenges, particularly through the global Research Data Alliance. Natasha holds a number of positions on international Boards and is co-chair of the DataCite Community Engagement Steering Group and the APAC Expert Group.

Jennifer is Executive Director of Dryad, the open data publishing platform and community committed to the reuse of all research data. Since 2005, she has worked with scientists, funders, publishers, libraries, developers and others to explore fresh paths toward accelerating discovery through open research communication and open-technology innovation. Prior to Dryad, Jennifer was Head of Open Research Communication and founding Head of Marketing and Communications for eLife, a non-profit and research funder-backed initiative to transform science publishing.

Jez helps researchers and librarians make the most of technology, with a focus on research data and software. He is currently Data Services Lead at the British Library, where he is responsible for enabling researchers to get DOIs for their outputs through the UK DataCite Consortium, and for the Library’s overall approach to data and datasets in the national collections. He is passionate about learning & teaching, good software engineering practice and making technology accessible to a more diverse range of people. He holds an MSci in Mathematics and Computing and a PGCert in Higher Education, is a certified Carpentries Instructor and a Fellow of the Software Sustainability Institute. Jez has his own blog.

Andrea oversees the National Library of New Zealand’s digital preservation programme and leads the team responsible for operating the National Digital Heritage Archive. She collaborates with others at the Library and around the world to advance digital preservation standards and practices. Andrea runs the NZ DOI Consortium, and participates in many regional and international working groups related to digital preservation, web archiving, and PIDs. She has a M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Florida.

Hana joined the National Library of Technology in Prague in 2022 and is currently the head of its National Centre for Persistent Identifiers. The Centre supports the use of PIDs on the national level and leads the national ORCID and DataCite consortia. Hana has a background in information and library science and has experience with information services in a public institution as well as a multinational private company.

Amy assists members of the Stanford community with sharing and preservation of research outputs in the Stanford Digital Repository (SDR). She is the Product Owner for the SDR’s self-deposit application and co-manages the campus DOI service. Prior to joining Stanford Libraries in 2012, Amy worked on scientific databases in the biotech and biofuels industries, developing methods for collecting and synthesizing sophisticated information into easy-to-understand formats. Amy earned a PhD in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale University, where she studied cell cycle regulation in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

Alice is a co-founder of the MoreBrains Cooperative, a consulting organization that specializes in — and supports the values of — open research. Her career has spanned both scholarly publishing (at Blackwell Publishing and then Wiley) and research infrastructures — first as Director of Community Engagement & Support of ORCID, and then in a similar role at NISO (National Information Standards Organization). Alice is actively involved in the scholarly communications community, including as President of the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) in 2021-22 and as a regular contributor to The Scholarly Kitchen blog. She is passionate about the need for a robust and open global research infrastructure, and about improving diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility – in scholarly communications and in society at large.

Sheila Rabun is the Program Leader for Persistent Identifier Communities at Lyrasis, where she manages the Lyrasis DataCite US Community consortium and the ORCID US Community consortium. In this role, she works with non-profit organizations across the US to support open research infrastructure by using persistent identifiers to make research and scholarly content more FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable). Sheila has worked in the academic library field since 2010, with a focus on digital workflows, agile project management, communicating technical information to diverse audiences, and advocating for interoperability in cultural heritage, research, and scholarly communication ecosystems.

Carly Robinson is the US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) Assistant Director for the Office of Information Products and Services (IPS). IPS leads the OSTI persistent identifier services, manages development of OSTI search tools providing access to DOE-funded R&D results, and responsibility over metadata quality and curation, communications, management of interagency and international products, and policy development and implementation. She has a Ph.D. and M.S. in Atmospheric Chemistry from the University of Colorado, and a B.S. in Applied Physics from Michigan Technological University.

Paula Saavedra is Project Manager at Consortia SAS, where she is the leader of the processes of loyalty, technological project management, management of the DataCite Consortium in Colombia through Papyrus-datos.co and the ORCID Consortium. From Consortia we support institutions to strengthen their research capabilities, high-quality resource consultation and use of persistent identifiers. Paula is a systems engineer with a specialization in IT projects.

Rodrigo Donoso-Vegas is a Librarian, master’s in communication and new technologies. He is the Director of the Directorate of Information Services and Libraries of the University of Chile. He is specialized in the management of university libraries, working in public and private institutions leading automation processes, and the development of new products and services.

Adam is the product specialist for persistent identifiers in open research at Jisc. He is an advocate of the need for the outputs of research to be openly available and easy to discover and access, with experience across a wide array of enabling technologies and infrastructures, including metacognitive and adaptive learning, hypertext, bioinformatics and RIM/repository architecture. His current interests focus on ensuring the global connectivity enabled by PIDs, infrastructure and metadata allow for equitable discovery and access for all scholarly work and developing information structures. With a focus on enabling practice research, and other non text outputs, to be included in that global academy, no longer represented as OTHER.

Helena leads the DataCite Engagement team and is responsible for all DataCite’s membership and community activities. She’s committed to DataCite’s mission and passionate about making DataCite services available globally. Before joining DataCite, Helena worked as Senior Product Manager for Research Data Management Solutions at Elsevier. She holds a DPhil in Neuroscience from the University of Oxford.