This is a guest blog post by Adam Farquhar, Deputy President of the DataCite Board.
With this blog post, I wanted to let you know that, after a full decade, I will be stepping down from the DataCite Board. I’ve served as President or Deputy President since the day that we founded DataCite in 2009.
While there is much work still to be done to achieve our vision to make research data first class objects in the scholarly landscape, the progress that we have made over the intervening years has been remarkable. It is now almost common place to cite data and take meaningful steps to ensuring that it is findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. Many of the younger members of the community would be shocked to experience the pushback we received in our early days.
I’m amazed at what we’ve accomplished together. As of 2019, DataCite DOIs are used to identify millions of datasets and are issued by thousands of data centres through over a hundred members. Our services are scalable, supported, and managed by a professional team. We’ve responded to changes in research and successfully integrated commercial entities, research institutes, universities, libraries and many more organisations into the multidisciplinary DataCite family. We’ve driven change and innovation through our own research and development.
Through those years and the growth that we’ve achieved, I think that we’ve also managed to nurture a caring culture. The DataCite community shares a vision for the role of data and other research artefacts and we tried to share a collaborative, generous, helpful relationship to each other. This has been especially important as we’ve addressed challenges and the pains of growth. I trust that you will continue to build on and strengthen our culture.
I’m very proud to have helped to found DataCite and shepherd it through its first decade. I have confidence that its second decade will be even more impactful. This year will see some big changes as Trisha Cruse retires from her role as Executive Director. I am, however, pleased to have been able to contribute to the Transition Group that successfully recruited and appointed Matt Buys as our Executive Director. I warmly welcome Matt Buys into his new leadership role at DataCite and I am delighted that he is taking on an organisation that is healthy, financially strong, growing, and widely valued. Matt is well placed to carry the DataCite mission forward into its next phase.
Finally, I believe in our mission as fervently today as I did at the start. I trust that we will all continue to provide DataCite with the support that it needs as we move forward.
