15 May 2025

Attending Open Repositories? Meet Meredith Goins, WDS Executive Director at the 20th International Conference on Open Repositories in Chicago, 15-18 June 2025.  Contact wds-ipo@utk.edu to set a meeting with her while there! 

In addition to Meredith’s presentation on the TRUST Principles on Tuesday, 17 June, WDS members presenting at Open Repos include California Digital Library, DataCite, ICPSR, OpenAire, ORCID, and the Swedish National Data Service. 

WDS is proud to announce the latest update to our Early Career Researchers (ECR) layer on the community map, showcasing the expansion of our network and the global representation of our members. 

We invite you to engage further with our network by sharing your current work and achievements, which we would love to highlight. Additionally, we welcome your ideas on topics for expert information and advice. Please contact our ECR co-chairs or the network coordinator, Daniela Santos Oliveira, at doliveir@utk.edu. 

Feel free to share this newsletter with your colleagues and invite them to join our network. 

Natalie Raia, a valued member of our WDS - Early Career Researcher (ECR) Network, has recently joined the Board of Directors of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), one of the largest and most influential scientific societies in the world. AGU supports more than half a million earth and space scientists globally, and its leadership plays a key role in shaping how science is shared, governed, and communicated. For Natalie, this appointment is both a recognition of her interdisciplinary expertise and an opportunity to scale the impact of her work on a global stage. 

Here’s what Natalie shared about her journey: 

“The opportunity to serve on the AGU Board of Directors came directly from networking. But I didn’t set out with ‘networking’ or leadership on the Board as specific goals. At the end of my PhD, I was working to change career directions to better align with my interests, making a shift from geochemistry to information science and open science-focused work. During this time, I used online spaces such as LinkedIn and topical Slack channels to learn about a new landscape of organizations, research topics, people, and career pathways in the topics I was interested in. I identified a few key people whose careers I admired and wanted to learn from but was intimidated to reach out to them. I kept my mind open to possibilities and started asking early career peers in positions or organizations of interest if they would sit for 30-minute informational interviews on Zoom to talk about their jobs and career perspectives. After hearing about my interests, some of the people I spoke with recommended other contacts to talk with and connected me to them; increasingly, the people I was in contact with were more senior and established - the type of people who sit on hiring teams and have valuable long-term perspectives. This scaffolding happened quickly—within less than 10 conversations. Going through this information-gathering process meant that when a spontaneous opportunity presented itself at a conference to make a connection with one of the key people I initially admired on LinkedIn, I was prepared and confident to speak with them. Who introduced us? Their early career supervisee, who I met during a poster session. This key connection, in addition to the connections and expertise I continued to build from collaborations with them and others, put me in position for the AGU Board Director opportunity.” 

Natalie’s story is a testament to the power of networking and staying open to new opportunities. Her journey from geochemistry to information science highlights how being proactive in seeking knowledge and connections can lead to remarkable achievements. We hope her experience inspires you to pursue your passions, embrace new challenges, and build meaningful relationships within your field. 

Remember, every conversation can be a steppingstone towards your next big opportunity. Keep exploring, keep connecting, and keep pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.

The Coalition for Networked Information’s Spring 2025 Membership Meeting videos are now openly available on the CNI website and on CNI’s  YouTube and Vimeo channels. Two videos of interest are from WDS members: Data Curation Network and California Digital Library. 

What Are We Even Doing Here? Building a Community of People Working with Data 

Sophia Lafferty-Hess, Duke University 

Wanda Marsolek, University of Minnesota  

Watch Here 

The Collaborative Metadata Enrichment Taskforce (COMET): Uniting Stakeholders for Collaborative Metadata Enrichment 

John Chodacki, California Digital Library 

Watch Here

For more than thirty years, the International Astronautical Federation (IAF) and the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) have co-organized a technical workshop ahead of each International Astronautical Congress (IAC). In 2025, the workshop will adopt a new dual focus — Space for Oceans and disaster-risk management — reflecting the IAC2025 theme: “Sustainable Space: Resilient Earth.”

The workshop is organized by the IAF with the support of the UNOOSA with the theme “Resilient Coasts, Resilient Earth: Innovative Space Solutions for Coastal Resilience and Emergency Management”, and the call for abstracts is open until 15 June 2025.

Date: 26-28 September 2025, in conjunction with the 76th International Astronautical Congress (IAC)

Venue: International Convention Centre, Sydney, Australia

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science provides a portfolio of high-performance computing facilities housing some of the world’s most advanced supercomputers. These leadership computing facilities enable world-class research for significant advances in science.

Open to researchers from academia, government labs, and industry, the Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) Program is the major means by which the scientific community gains access to the most capable, most productive, fastest open science supercomputers in the nation. The program aims to accelerate scientific discoveries and technological innovations by awarding, on a competitive basis, time on supercomputers to researchers with large-scale, computationally intensive projects that address “grand challenges” in science and engineering. 

The 2026 INCITE Call for Proposals is open from 9 April through 16 June 2025.

The Fifth International Conference on Digital Data Processing (DDP 2025) will be held 18-20 August at the University of Bedfordshire in Luton, United Kingdom. Participants will review and discuss the latest trends in data management, the opportunities and challenges, and how they have affected organizations to develop effective business and technology strategies and stay up to date in data technology. The conference will also highlight current open research directions in data analytics that need further attention.

Submissions for papers are open until 20 June 2025 and must be blind; authors should not specify their names and affiliations in the paper.

The International Council for Scientific and Technical Information (ICSTI) is hosting their 2025 Annual Conference and General Assembly in Zurich, Switzerland, 18-19 September.

This year's conference workshops follow the theme of “Bridging Open Science Ethics and Infrastructure” and are free and open to all.

Requests for formal invitations should be sent to addie.cox@icsti.org. 

The National Cancer Institute’s (NCI) Office of Data Sharing (ODS) is excited to welcome you to their upcoming inaugural data jamboree to promote the sharing, access, and reuse of pediatric and adolescents and young adults (AYA) cancer datasets.

To raise awareness of existing childhood cancer data resources (see examples here), and promote data utility and interdisciplinary collaboration, the jamboree is calling on investigators, postdocs, and late-stage graduate students interested in utilizing pediatric and AYA cancer data as part of their research as well as citizen scientists to collaborate and explore scientific questions to solve to inform better diagnosis and treatment options for children and AYA patients. Computational expertise is not required to participate.

Interested parties/individuals are required to register and submit a project abstract (to solve a specific problem with a project team or look to join a team) by 23 June 2025.

On 2 June 2025 (09:00-17:00 CET), CoARA-ERIP, in collaboration with the European Commission, is organizing a hybrid conference at the Royal Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts (KVAB), titled, ‘Advancing responsible research assessment for funders in the European digital space: A dialogue on ethics, integrity, and open infrastructures’.

The one-day conference will bring together the full spectrum of European stakeholders involved in research assessment—spanning the European Commission, research funding organizations (RFOs), research performing organizations (RPOs), infrastructure providers and developers, policy experts, and representatives from CoARA, ENRIO, and affiliated initiatives—for an open dialogue on the responsible integration of artificial intelligence into science and research funding mechanisms.

A preliminary program of the conference is available here.

Did your research just get published? Do you an upcoming event to share? Have you had a recent job change or promotion? Share it here.

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