Announcing Our New Application Developer

DataCite is pleased to welcome Kristian Garza to our team. Kristian is our new application developer and he comes to DataCite with a wealth of experience in Open Science, web development, and data repositories. Get to know him better via this interview.

Can you tell us a little bit about what you did before starting for DataCite?

Before joining DataCite I have been transitioning between academia and industry for a while. I started my career as a processes designer for a manufacturing company. After 3 years I decided to move to London and joined an MSc programme at University College London.

Just after graduation, I joined the CLUSTER II mission Operations Team at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory (MSSL) in Surrey. There, I worked with Prof. Andrew Fazakerley in the investigation of Aurora Acceleration Regions under the Extension plan of the Cluster II mission.

Then, I moved to Mexico and joined Datamine. At Datamine I was working as a Software Developer for enterprise applications. I moved back to academia in 2012. Under the supervision of Prof. Carole Goble, I worked on the evaluation of new approaches for incentivising research data sharing.

There is been published work in Social Psychology and Behavioural Economics that indicates that small changes in web interfaces (and other mediums) can help or bias users’ decision-making. My work tested the use of these Behavioural Economics models in researchers (i.e. users) that self-deposit data in a data repository. Specifically, we attempted to help or bias researchers’ decision-making toward following more open access practices when it comes to depositing their data online. My work [@https://doi.org/10.1145/2783446.2783605] has shown that these kind of interventions are a useful tool for data repository designers looking to promote good sharing practices into their users with minor tweaks.

What interested you in the job at DataCite? Any particular problems that you would like to work on?

I am interested in working on infrastructure that would promote research data sharing. Working at DataCite is an opportunity that combines my research interest on research data sharing and my desire to build things.

There are three things in particular that I am interested in working on:

the development of services that reduce perceived risks and increase individual benefits for scientists sharing their data (e.g. the DataCite Event Data service),
the incorporation of these services into scientific workflows, and
the study of persistent identification adoption patterns in the sciences.

DataCite Event Data is one of them, as it potentially could lead to reduce the cost associated with data citation. The service reduces the cost associated with linking data providers with a dataset in an automated fashion. This is a small dent in the costs associated with data sharing and data citation but one in the right direction.

Providing services that create individual benefits (i.e., “individual” carrots) is a different dimension of funder mandates (i.e., sticks). These two dimensions are related in that both are trying to incentivise researchers to share their data; they have the same goal but follow a different approach.

What aspect of application development interests you most?

Choosing one single aspect of application development that entices me is a daunting task. I am going to say: testing. Mostly because evaluating is a fundamental activity in my past line of work (i.e. academic research) and thus I would like to learn and master the evaluation methodologies in application development.

Any particular programming language or framework you would like to learn/understand better while working at DataCite?

My interest depends on the problems I am facing at a particular time. My first priority is to learn the development toolkit used by DataCite. On the other hand, I am excited about development of applications using node.js, thus I would like to learn that.

Kristian has started working on the DataCite Statistics portal and Citation Formatter service. You can reach out to him via the comments here, via email, or via the usual DataCite channels.