Services and Technology Steering Group

Rachael is Associate University Librarian for Digital Strategy and Services at the University of Chicago Library, where her current portfolio encompasses Library systems and IT, repositories, discovery, digital scholarship and digitization. She has spent more than 15 years in National and Academic Libraries, always with a focus on infrastructure for open scholarship, and as an active participant in community initiatives on national and international infrastructures for identifiers in research. Other areas of interest are collections as data, accessibility, and digital literacy.

Pascal is an active member of the DSpace community, a widely used open access repository software. He is a member of the DSpace Steering, Leadership and Committer Group, and developed support for DOI registration with DataCite in DSpace. In 2015 he founded The Library Code, a Platinum DSpace service provider, which he leads as CEO.

Zeynep Cevik is a Data Support Specialist at Borealis (Scholars Portal, University of Toronto Libraries). She supports research data management, curation, and metadata integration, and develops workflows and training materials to enhance data deposit practices across institutions. Zeynep holds a PhD in Economics and has extensive experience in statistical analysis, econometrics, and research data support.

Brian Joseph Geiger has spent most of the past decade as a software engineer for the Center for Open Science. There he currently develops for the front end of the Open Science Framework, though his biggest accomplishment was bringing the public API for OSF to life.

Joined DataCite: January 2024
Based in: Portland, Oregon, USA

Maria leads DataCite’s Global Community and Services team, where she is responsible for the organization’s product vision and community strategy and coordinates strategic initiatives across the organization and with external partners. As part of her role, she also directs the Research Organization Registry (ROR). Prior to joining DataCite, Maria worked on research infrastructure and scholarly communications at the California Digital Library, the University of California, Berkeley Library, and PLOS.

Favorite DataCite thing: “The ways in which our services, infrastructure, and community activities bring both knowledge and people together.”

Yuyun leads the Institutional Repositories Team in Nanyang Technological University Library. She has spearheaded the research data repository assessment in NTU Library which led to certification. She enjoys interacting with repositories’ end-users and is passionate about user education.

Esther Jackson is Head of Open Scholarship at Columbia University Libraries, where she leads initiatives to expand public access to scholarly information. She oversees a team that manages Academic Commons (Columbia’s digital repository), runs the Journal Publishing and Podcast Publishing partnerships programs, and provides workshops, classroom instruction, and individual consultations on scholarly communication topics. She also serves on the Wikimedia Foundation’s Regional Fund for North America, DOAJ’s Editorial Policy Advisory Group, and OpenRefine’s Advisory Committee.

Sebastian Karcher is the Associate Director of the Qualitative Data Repository and Research Assistant Professor of Political Science at Syracuse University. His main interests are in research transparency, management and curation of qualitative data, and the integration of technology into scholarly workflows. He is an active contributor to several scholarly open source projects, including Zotero and the Citation Style Language, and has taught widely on digital technology and data management. Sebastian’s work has been published widely in social science journals such as International Studies Quarterly and Socio-Economic Review as well as information science journals such as Nature Scientific Data and Data Science Journal. His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), and the Sloan Foundation.

Jens Klump is a geochemist by training and leads the Exploration Through Cover Research Group in CSIRO Mineral Resources based in Perth, Western Australia. In his work on data infrastructures, Jens covers the entire chain of digital value creation from data acquisition to data analysis with a focus on data in minerals exploration. Jens earned degrees in geology and in oceanography from the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and received his PhD in marine geology from the University of Bremen, Germany. Before joining CSIRO, Jens was a senior researcher at the Helmholtz Centre Potsdam – GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences.

Allen Lee is a computer scientist and research software engineer at Arizona State University’s School of Complex Adaptive Systems. He provides technical vision and leadership for open science initiatives like the Network for Computational Modeling in the Social and Ecological Sciences, the Open Modeling Foundation, is engaged in research in collective action and the commons and serves as a Software and Data Carpentries instructor and lesson maintainer for the Plotting and Programming in Python and Good Enough Practices in Scientific Computing lessons.

Rory has been involved in the development of research data management for the past 20 years. As the CEO of Research Space, he has overseen the evolution of RSpace from an electronic lab notebook to a digital research platform that enables the FAIRification of research data. RSpace is distinguished by an open architecture that facilitates connectivity and interoperability with other research tools and researchers. A specific focus is on integrations with data repositories, including Dataverse, Zenodo, Dryad, and Figshare, and data management planning tools, such as DMPTool, Argos, DMPonline, and Data Stewardship Wizard.

Ian Mathews is the CEO and co-founder of Redivis, a data platform focused on the needs of academic research. He envisions a world where data are widely accessible and believes that well-designed, researcher-focused software will be critical to making this happen. Prior to his work at Redivis, Ian worked with global health researchers and data journalists as he taught himself software development and the tools of interactive data visualization. Ian holds BAs in Public Policy and Economics from Stanford University.

Anne works at the University of Maryland for NASA’s Planetary Data System (PDS) as a data standards expert and metadata engineer. She focuses on issues of discoverability, reusability, and interoperability both within the PDS and among the national planetary archives that comprise the International Planetary Data Alliance.

Uwe is responsible for the development of the technical infrastructure at PANGAEA, Data Publisher for Earth & Environmental Science, hosted by MARUM, University of Bremen. His main focus is on describing datasets with metadata, their discovery, and standards around FAIR sharing. He is also an active project member of several search-related open-source products like Apache Lucene, Apache Solr, Apache POI and contributes to related projects like Opensearch/Elasticsearch and Apache TIKA. In his former life, he studied physics at the University of Erlangen/Nuremberg.

Joined DataCite: September 2019
Based in: Belmont, Massachusetts, USA

Sarala directs the DataCite engineering team. Prior to joining DataCite, she spent ten years at EMBL-EBI in Cambridge, UK, where she led several data integration projects, including the Identifiers.org resource. She holds a PhD in Bioengineering and a BE in Software Engineering from the University of Auckland.

Favorite DataCite thing: “Building innovative, scalable, and reliable services that support research discovery and reuse.”