6 February 2025

Hi subscriber,

We’re so excited to present to you the latest edition of the WDS Newsletter. Thank you for being an avid reader and subscribing to our newsletter. WDS would like to introduce you to events, announcements, and calls for the month of February.

Scroll to find out important opportunities and calls from the WDS community.

Have something to share in our next newsletter? Send us the information below! 

The World Data System’s International Program Office (WDS-IPO) is delighted to announce the appointments of Dr. Yuya Shibuya and Dr. Jing Zhao as the new Co-chairs for the World Data System Early Career Researcher Network (WDS-ECR Network), joining Dr. Claire Rye, the current Co-chair. Their expertise in Earth Observation and Data research will help reinforce the WDS-ECR Network’s vision and goals.

The WDS-ECR Network plays a pivotal role in fostering collaboration and knowledge exchange among early-stage researchers from diverse disciplines across the globe. It serves as a platform for networking, sharing experiences, and exploring innovative approaches to data management and research practices.

To learn more about the World Data System Early Career Researcher Network and its current Co-chairs, please visit our website.

Please join us in congratulating our new Co-chairs, Dr. Shibuya and Dr. Zhao! We look forward to their contributions to advancing data-driven research within the ECR community.

WDS extends its gratitude to Maja Dolinar and Dr. Lianchong Zhang for their dedicated service and unwavering support of the Early Career Researcher community. Their contributions have greatly enriched our community, fostering collaboration and support for early career researchers around the globe.

Their efforts have strengthened the network and provided valuable opportunities for engagement and growth. We appreciate all they have contributed and look forward to future collaborations. Both will now join the ECR's advisory board, where they will continue to offer invaluable guidance and mentorship to emerging professionals in the field. WDS wishes you both continued success in your work!

The World Data System (WDS) and its Scientific Committee are launching a study using the Delphi Method to identify the top 10 value-added benefits of data repositories for researchers, funders, policy-makers, and other stakeholders. This study aims to demonstrate the importance of repositories in the scientific community by highlighting their role in research data management and the need for recurring investment to maintain and enhance these services.  

We seek participants from five stakeholder categories: funders, researchers, digital infrastructure providers, policy-makers, and journal publishers. If you belong to one of these groups, please click on this link to complete the first survey round, which will take approximately 30-60 minutes.   

The deadline for this first phase of the survey is March 12, 2025.  

For questions or comments, contact ito-director@oceannetworks.ca. 

On 14 and 15 January 2025, WDS-ITO and re3data hosted "Data Repository Descriptive Metadata: Recommendations & Resources," a workshop emphasizing the importance of metadata used to describe data repositories. 

Visit the Webinar Archive page to watch the recording or review the slides.

Click on the logos to learn more about our new members. We welcome the Center for Digital Antiquity and the University of Victoria Dataverse to the WDS community and look forward to collaborating with them!

International Data Week (IDW) 2025 is a unique event that combines the Research Data Alliance (RDA) Plenary Meeting, the biannual meeting of this global community driven organization building the social and technical bridges to enable research data sharing and reuse, and SciDataCon, a scientific conference addressing the frontiers of data in research organized by CODATA and WDS. IDW2025 is taking place from 13-16 October 2025 in Brisbane, Australia, generously hosted by the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC). This year’s theme for IDW, “Data for Positive Change”. 

Webinar participants will receive guidance on how to navigate the rich four-day IDW2025 program and learn what a ticket to IDW2025 will include. The webinar is open to all; IDW newcomers and also those who have already attended previous editions of IDW. This is a chance to meet and learn more about the IDW founding organizations and ask any questions you might have regarding IDW 2025. 

This is the second webinar on IDW benefits and opportunities for the Oceania time zone. Recordings and slides will be available to all. 

IDW 2025 Registration

Join us in Brisbane for IDW 2025 and help shape the future of global data science. Register today and be part of something truly extraordinary!

There is still time to register at the early bird rate below.

The 2025 edition of this conference on interdisciplinary approaches to speech science and technology focuses on the theme ‘Fair and Inclusive Speech Science and Technology’. 

Deadline for submissions: 12 February 2025 

Event Date: 17 - 21 August 2025 

Location: Rotterdam, Netherlands 

In this Plan, the National Institute of Health (NIH) presents a combination of efforts that are already underway and planned efforts that will increase the findability of research outputs and promote transparency in the research process. For the full plan, click here.

Comments must be submitted electronically using the form link. Feedback can be added to this the form, uploaded as an attachment or both.

Feedback Deadline: 21 February 2025

The 11th International Contrastive Linguistics Conference 2025 (ICLC) promotes fine-grained cross-linguistic research comprising two or more languages from a broad range of theoretical and methodological perspectives. 

They are inviting the research community to submit abstracts on a broad range of topics, including: 

- Comparison of phenomena in two or more languages addressing topics from any area and level of linguistic analysis; 

- Methodological challenges and solutions in cross-linguistic research; 

- Contrastive linguistics in touch with related disciplines. 

Submission Deadline: 24 February 2025 

Event Date: 17-19 September 2025 

Call for submissions is open to the fifth biennial conference on Language, Data and Knowledge (LDK 2025), which brings together researchers from different disciplines concerned with the acquisition, curation, and use of language data in the context of data science and knowledge-based applications. 

Deadline for submissions: 6 March 2025 

Event Date: 9-12 September 2025 

Location: Naples, Italy 

The Open Research Community Accelerator (ORCA) launched its Open Scholarship Catalytic Awards Program. This program aims to promote open scholarship at accredited under-resourced, non-R1 US institutions by funding projects that enhance transparency, reproducibility, community engagement, and collaboration. 

What is offered: 

Flexible funding from $5,000 to $15,000 USD per project. 

Mentorship and guidance in project management and impact evaluation. 

A community of practice for networking and shared learning. 

Application Deadline: 15 March 2025 

The FAIROS Program is accepting proposals for funding. It supports a broad range of transformative open science activities including but not limited to: 

1. Research, education, and socio-technical cyberinfrastructure development capacities that advance sustainable multi-disciplinary findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable (FAIR) research data management (RDM) and open science capabilities 

2. Piloting new models of scientific communication and publication that improve efficiency and accessibility 

3. Developing FAIROS data portals, research data commons, RDM as a national service 

4. Lowering barriers to accessing, curating, integrating, linking, managing, sharing, and storing data across many disciplinary domains, irrespective of data size. 

FAIROS proposals must select one of two tracks to focus on, either: 1) Disciplinary Improvements  to targeted scientific communities, or 2) Cross-Cutting Improvements that apply to many or most scientific disciplines.  

The FAIROS Program is undertaken in support of the US National Science Foundation (NSF) Public Access Initiative 

Proposal submissions are due 9 April 2025. 

The SDG Classifier Demonstrator is a tool designed to support publishers in aligning with the goals of the SDG Publishers Compact, which encourages categorizing published content to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The SDG Classifier uses a pre-configured algorithm to evaluate content against specific SDG targets, then returns the number and name of all SDGs that the text matches. Stakeholders and publishers are invited to test the tool with sample data and offer feedback.

Feedback Deadline: 30 March 2025

We’re encouraging all readers who are not subscribed to register.