Interviewing on ANDS and RDA, in the Netherlands

Just in case you were wondering what it is like in Australia in the research data landscape? I am afraid I can´t tell you yet as my visa has not yet come through. Meanwhile I am still working for Knowledge Exchange and am quite busy organising workshops and planning the future of the initiative.

However, Andrew Treloar from ANDS can tell you all about the landscape and he will be at the SURF office on Friday 4 October for a seminar ´Data Infrastructure and the Scholarly Ecosystem of the Future´. I will be interviewing him not only on the Australian landscape but also on the challenges of coordinating infrastructure across national boundaries. This is an area in which the Research Data Alliance is active and I am looking forward to hearing from Andrew on the development of this initiative and finding out where and how this will be of interest to Dutch institutions.

With a big thank you to DANS for arranging for Andrew to come to the Netherlands as visiting fellow and being willing to host this workshop.

Moving to ANDS in Australia

As you might have guessed from the last posting, I will be leaving Knowledge Exchange. I am really looking forward to starting work as Partnership Program Manager at the Australian National Data Service, ANDS for short. The Australian Commonwealth Government's Department of Industry, Innovation, Science Research and Tertiary Education has had the foresight to fund and support the development of ANDS at a time when other countries had not even started considering the value of Research Data as a very important research asset. This has allowed ANDS to become a leading organisation worldwide in setting up services like ‘Research Data Australia’ and ‘Cite My Data’ I am really looking forward to learning about the Australian landscape at work and discovering some more of the physical Australian landscape at the weekends. I will be starting work on 1st of September at the ANDS office at Monash University
in Melbourne.

Four and a half years at Knowledge Exchange

Digital Author Identifier Summit in London

It has been rather quiet on this blog. The main reason is that I put most of my energy in communicating work related stuff through Knowledge Exchange, through the website, twitter, etc. The past years at Knowledge Exchange were very lively and taught me a lot. Working with the partner organisations has shown me the value and richness of the different cultural backgrounds and approaches. I have learnt a lot from the insights of the experts. What is also great is the variety in interests of the partner organisations ranging from research funding, infrastructure funding, innovation, libraries and tackling the range from hard to soft e-infrastructure. In my view the true power behind KE is the interaction between the experts in the partner organisations and countries. It was always really inspiring to bring a group of experts together and to see how quickly discussions arose and the speed in which great ideas could be developed. The years have been quite lively, some really relevant reports were released and workshops organised. The initiative has recently been expanded with the fifth member, CSC. The challenge is now to balance large expectations and ambitions with the limited scale which is KE. It never has been a large initiative and its power has been to pick out the small ground breaking activities where it is really useful to bring knowledge together, share, develop this further and start a debate. I trust this will continue to lead to valuable results in the future.