PIDfest 26

Alice Kallman is a born and raised New Yorker. After attending the University of Chicago and working for a handful of years in New Orleans at a public defender's office, Alice began her Masters in Library Science at Queens College. She served as a fellow with Citi Center for Culture + Queens Public Library as well as a Scholarly Communications Fellow with CUNY. Post-graduation, she moved into correctional librarianship with the Queens Public Library and assisted graduate students at the CUNY Graduate Center. Alice has presented talks on the topics of justice in librarianship and algorithmic bias, and was awarded a 2025 CUNY Adjunct Incubator Grant to continue a personal research project archiving Syrian superstitions. She now works as a librarian at the American University in Cairo supporting graduate and faculty research. Her current interests include intersections between the Open Access movement, Artificial Intelligence, and Critical Information Literacy.

Alice is an independent consultant, who specializes in — and supports the values of — open research. She frequently collaborates with Open Research Ecosystem Consulting and was previously a co-founder of the MoreBrains Cooperative. Alice's career has spanned both scholarly publishing and research infrastructures. Alice is actively involved in the scholarly communications community, including as a regular contributor to their Scholarly Kitchen blog. She is passionate about the need for a robust and open global research infrastructure (with a particular interest in metadata and workflows) and about improving diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility - in scholarly communications and in society at large.

Amanda French, ROR Technical Community Manager, is a well-known community manager and project director in the scholarly communication and digital humanities spheres. At Crossref, she works to encourage and support use of the Research Organization Registry (ROR).

Amanda French, ROR Technical Community Manager, is a well-known community manager and project director in the scholarly communication and digital humanities spheres. At Crossref, she works to encourage and support use of the Research Organization Registry (ROR).

Science Data Librarian, Stanford University Libraries

Dr Amy Pascalia Abra Asimah is the University Librarian at the Regional Maritime University (RMU), Ghana. She holds a PhD in Information Science from the University of South Africa. Amy is a Library and Information Science (LIS) researcher, and passionate advocate for PID, Open Science, and the broader Open Movement. With a strong background in scholarly communications, Amy has championed initiatives that promote research publication, visibility, transparency, accessibility, and collaboration. She has won grants from recognised funding agencies such as ORCID, and leading several consortia projects in the OS and maritime spaces. Amy has a wealth of experience in research infrastructure, metadata standards, researcher identity management, and continues to support efforts that empower researchers through open and equitable scholarly ecosystems. She is a member of Ghana Library Association, Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Ghana, Library Support for Embedded NREN Services and E-infrastructure and Creative Commons Global Network.

Ana is responsible for developing and promoting community adoption of ORCID across different regions in the world. She also focuses on growing and improving ORCID integration development and knowledge. She is always seeking for global collaboration, with emphasis on the Latin America and the Caribbean region. She has collaborated with several institutions from different sectors during their development, implementation and adoption of ORCID and has participated in several international conferences and training throughout her career. Ana is an enthusiastic and active promoter of Open Science and Persistent Identifiers (PIDs). She has an MBA from the Antonio de Nebrija University in Spain and is passionate about teaching and data analysis.

Ana is the Head of Customer Engagement for Government, Funders & Nonprofits at Digital Science and manages the Government and Funder program at Figshare. She is a PI in the NIH Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative and currently co-chairs community engagement activities for the program. She holds a PhD in Cognitive Psychology and has worked in open data and open science for more than 10 years.

Interoperability expert now in the Netherlands, previously an environmental physicist with a long career in research infrastructure management and data projects.

Audrey has many years of experience developing websites and digital repositories related to libraries and to scientific publishing, with previous roles in software development at Europe PMC, PubMed Central, and the University of Delaware Library. She holds a Master's in Library and Information Science from Drexel University.

Advisor, research analyst and facilitator at Sesame Open Science
Executive Director, Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information

Carly Huitema helps lead the strategic design and development of Agri-food Data Canada at the University of Guelph, a cross-sectoral platform for research data and analytics. Her work focuses on improving the accessibility, interoperability, and usability of agri-food data across academia, government, and industry.

She also contributes to decentralized digital infrastructure as Co-Chair of the Steering Committee at the Trust over IP Foundation, where she supports the development of frameworks for digital trust, decentralized identity, and interoperable data ecosystems.

Carly holds a PhD in Microbiology from the University of British Columbia and previously worked in Switzerland with a medical diagnostics start-up. Her multidisciplinary experience spans data science, regulatory frameworks, and project management, which she applies to advancing trusted, decentralized approaches to data sharing.

Charlie is a PIDs Librarian (Bibliothécaire spécialiste des identifiants uniques pérennes) at Université Laval (Québec, Canada) since 2023. She is a member of the DataCite Canada governing committee since 2024 and Chair of ORCID Canada since 2025.

After working in several academic libraries in a wide range of positions, I started to coordinate the TIB's VIVO activities as a member of the Open Science Lab in 2016. Since then I participated in diverse activities and projects around open research information, persistent identifiers (PIDs), linked (open) data, open science, and the open source research information system VIVO. I'm leading the Lab Group Open Research Information that was founded in 2020.

Computational and Data Science Research Specialist, San Diego Supercomputer Center, Co-Founder, GO FAIR US, Open Science Advisor, SciLifeLab, Community Partnerships Consultant, RAiD / ARDC

At the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Dan is Chief Scientist at NCSA and Research Professor in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science and in the School of Information Sciences. He works on issues at the triple point of research software, people, and policies.

Taking care of research data for years, Dario has a long history in ICT companies at international level.
After 26+ years in multinational companies, Dario joined the University of Milan in 2012 and since then he's been involved in many successful projects about research data.

Dr David Poger (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8794-5688) was awarded his PhD in Structural Biology from Joseph Fourier University (Grenoble, France) in 2005. He then moved to Australia where he studied the structure and dynamics of biological membranes, protein receptors and membrane-active compounds using computer simulations at The University of Queensland. In 2020, David joined Microscopy Australia, a consortium of nine university-based microscopy facilities, as Research Data Manager. He assisted microscopy facilities in data management by developing best practices and guiding them in their journey to FAIR data. In 2025, David joined the Australian Imaging Service and National Imaging Facility as Data Operations Manager. David participates actively in several projects and working groups in Australia and overseas to develop and promote best practices in research data management and build national network that facilitate data management, analysis, sharing and reuse.

Dr Dominic Dankwah Agyei is a practising librarian at the University of Health and Allied Sciences, Ghana, where he heads the E-Resources and Training Department. Dominic leads the LIBSENSE ECR Group in Ghana, and also chairs the working group on Open Science and Open Publishing at Public Health Africa (PHA). He is the 2024 MLA Cunningham Fellow. His research interests span open science, open access publishing, research data management, and policy issues in minority languages. Follow his publications here.

Dorothea Strecker is a researcher in the research group Information Management at the Berlin School of Library and Information Science, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
Her main research interests are open research information, information infrastructures and metadata for research data.
She is a member of the re3data Working Group, the DataCite Metadata Working Group and the ScholCommLab.

Ed Pentz became Crossref’s first Executive Director when the organization was founded in 2000 and manages all aspects of the organization to ensure that it fulfills its mission to make research outputs easy to find, cite, link and assess. Prior to joining Crossref, Ed held electronic publishing, editorial and sales positions at Harcourt Brace in the US and UK and managed the launch of Academic Press’s first online journal, the Journal of Molecular Biology, in 1995. Ed lives in Oxford, UK with his wife and two cats.

Gaëlle Béquet is the Director of the ISSN International Centre. Prior to this position, she has managed several academic libraries. She defended her PhD in information science in 2011 and she published a book about the development of digital libraries in Austria, France and the UK in 2014. She was Chair of ISO TC46 Information & Documentation 2014-2022.

Gernot Deinzer is head of the section Electronic Publishing and IT at the University Library of Regensburg and managing director of the UR Data Hub, the central institution for handling research data.

CPO at Crossref; instigator of Metadata 20/20; Steering Board member of Barcelona Declaration.

Hana Heringová leads the National Centre for Persistent Identifiers, which has been operating at the National Library of Technology in Prague, Czechia, since 2023. She is a co-chair of the National PIDs Strategy Interest Group under the Research Data Alliance and a member of DataCite's Community Engagement Steering Group.

Hana Šilha Machová is the coordinator of the Czech National ORCID Consortium, part of the National Centre for Persistent Identifiers at the National Library of Technology (NTK). She is involved in the EOSC CZ Core Services working group and has extensive experience in research support, persistent identifiers, and scholarly communication.

Hans de Jonge (1975) is director of Open Science NL, the national initiative for Open Science, part of the Dutch Research Council (NWO). He is co-chairing the funding metadata working group of the Barcelona Declaration and CoARA Board member.

Software Developer @ GFZ Data Services

Chief Communications Officer of the Somali Research & Education Network (SomaliREN)

Hylke Koers is the Chief Information Officer for STM Solutions, STM’s operational arm which develops and manages shared infrastructures and collaborative services to support the scholarly communications community. He is responsible for the STM Integrity Hub and serves as program director for GetFTR and SeamlessAccess. Before joining STM, Hylke worked in several senior technology and product management roles, in both private and public sector organizations, supporting the research community. He has held leading roles in FAIRsFAIR, the Research Data Alliance and served on the EOSC Architecture Working Group. Hylke holds a PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Amsterdam.

Strategic technology services partner in STM Publishing

National coordinator for the Czech Nation DOI Centre at the National Library of Technology.
Ph.D. Researcher at the Institute of International Studies of Charles University and Leiden University Centre for Arts in Society (LUCAS).

With over 10 years’ experience managing marine data at the British Oceanographic Data Centre (BODC), part of the National Oceanography Centre, facilitating data flows to international partners. I have processed and worked on managing, ingesting and facilitating data flows in the marine domain for various data types. I have led the management of the BODC Published Data Library for over 5 years, minting domain specific DOIs on data and supporting development of BODC systems as a Product Owner. This led me to discover the Research Data Alliance and my involvement in wider citation and use of PIDs.

Geochemist and Group Leader at CSIRO, working at the intersection of minerals exploration, data, and digital technology. Curious, cross‑disciplinary, and focused on practical impact.

John Aspler graduated from McGill University with a PhD in Neuroscience. Although originally interested in music cognition, his exposure to a stream of problematic neuroscience-related news publications both cultivated and cemented in him an interest in improving public scientific literacy. John pursued his research at McGill University and the Pragmatic Health Ethics Research Unit, where he worked on several projects about the media discourse surrounding people with neurodevelopmental disabilities (e.g., fetal alcohol spectrum disorder). He is also Manager, Canadian Persistent Identifier Community / Gestionnaire, Communauté canadienne des identifiants pérennes at CRKN-RCDR.

John Chodacki is Director of the University of California Curation Center (UC3) at California Digital Library (CDL). As UC3 Director, John works across the UC campuses and the broader community to ensure that CDL’s digital curation services meet the emerging needs of the scholarly community – including digital preservation, persistent identifiers, data management, and data publishing. Prior to CDL, John oversaw product development activities at publishing organizations such as O’Reilly Media, Safari Books Online, and PLOS. He has served on the board and/or steering committees of DataCite, Crossref, FORCE11, ROR (Research Organization Registry), COUNTER, Collaborative Knowledge (Coko) Foundation, Open Citations, Metadata 20/20, Make Data Count (MDC), Collaborative Metadata Enrichment (COMET), RDA-US, and The Carpentries.

Jonathan Clark is the Managing Agent for the DOI Foundation which is a not-for-profit membership organisation that manages the DOI System and is the registration authority for the ISO standard (ISO 26324).

Jonathan is one of the co-chairs of the Research Data Alliance Interest Group on Persistent Identifiers. When not doing something PID related, he works as an independent advisor on strategy and innovation. He is also a Guest Lecturer and External Examiner for two MBA programmes in the Netherlands. Prior to this Jonathan worked at Elsevier for 20 years in various positions in publishing, marketing and technology, and before that Shell Research. He holds a BSc and PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Jonathan was Chair and Director of the DOI Foundation from 2004-2010. He lives mostly in Croatia.

Jonathan Starr is the Executive Director of the Open Source Endowment, a 501(c)(3) building a community-managed permanent endowment for critical open source infrastructure. He also directs SciOS and the Institute of Open Science Practices, where he coordinates researchers and technologists building sustainable infrastructure for open science. His work spans funding mechanisms, coordination systems, and the shared technical substrate connecting diverse scientific systems.

Joy Owango is an internationally recognized leader in Open Science advocacy, research infrastructure development, and scholarly communication in Africa. She is the Executive Director of the Training Centre in Communication (TCC Africa), the first Africa-based centre dedicated to strengthening scientists’ skills in scholarly and science communication, enhancing research visibility and impact across the continent.

Owango is also a co-founder of the Africa PID Alliance, a pan-African initiative advancing the adoption and integration of Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) to strengthen research discovery, attribution, and interoperability in African research ecosystems. Through this work, she has championed the development of DOCiD (Digital Object Container Identifier), a federated PID container that links identifiers such as ORCID, ROR, CSTR, Crossref, DataCite, RAiD, and Handle into machine-actionable research objects aligned with FAIR Digital Object principles.

Her work promotes responsible data governance, equitable participation in global research infrastructure.

Head of Group Information Management at German Research Foundation (DFG)

Julia Gilmore is the Digital Projects Librarian at Scholars Portal and leads the development and delivery of the Scholaris shared institutional repository service, including coordinating the Early Adopter Program and participating as an ex-officio member of the Scholaris Network of Expert Groups (Digital Preservation Expert Group, Metadata & Discovery Expert Group, and the Electronic Theses & Dissertations Expert Group). She holds a Master of Information in Archives & Records Management from the University of Toronto and a BKin from McMaster University.

I work as a Data Specialist at Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden. I work in a team devoted to open science, and in particular, I focus on the aspects regarding technical implementation: PIDs, computational reproducibility, digital sovereignty, etc. Next to that, I take part in providing training workshops for researchers about research data management and other similar topics. I'm also passionate about open source software and hardware, since my background is in Robotic Engineering.

Kaela Ramhit serves currently as the ORCID US Community Program Specialist at Lyrasis. In this role, she supports ORCID US Community member organizations, answering questions on the technical aspects of ORCID, and in supporting ORCID outreach and education. Kaela has presented at multiple events and conferences, to peers, and facilitated services to students on best practices for creating accessible material. She has worked previously as a member of the University of Florida, George A. Smathers Libraries, and in public libraries. Her journey with PIDs has motivated her to grow further in expertise to better serve the global research community.

Kamani Perera has gained 30+ years professional experience
as a Librarian and obtained merit pass for master degree in
information management (MIM) from University of
Colombo, Sri Lanka. She is a visiting lecturer to Sri Lankan
universities in the field of information science and research
methodology and published over 100 research papers
nationally and internationally; travelled extensively in Asia,
America and Europe.
She was a member of many cultural organizations in the
world and contributed in International Advisory Boards, Editorial Boards and Review
Committees.
She is presently working as Manager – Research and Development in Chartered Institute
of Personnel Management (CIPM), Sri Lanka.

I can provide the biography later.

As an Open Science Information Specialist at EMBL-EBI, Katie provides researchers support and guidance on open science including access, funder requirements, publisher agreements, copyright, and data management. Before joining EMBL-EBI, Katie was the Open Access Librarian at King’s College London overseeing the open access team and the institutional repository. She has also worked at the University of Cambridge’s Scholarly Communication Office as the Open Access Research Advisor after receiving her Masters in Library and Information Studies from the University of British Columbia.

Kelly is responsible for the development and adoption of the DataCite Metadata Schema and works closely with the DataCite community on technical implementations. Prior to joining DataCite, Kelly worked at the Portage Network of the Digital Research Alliance of Canada, where they contributed to national data discovery initiatives and supported the DataCite Canada Consortium. Kelly holds an MLIS from the University of British Columbia, a BS in Computer Science, and a BMus in Music Composition.

Knowledge Exchange focuses on the cooperation between experts and institutions and the formation of coalitions of pioneers in the field of open science. Knowledge Exchange consists of CSC (Finland), CNRS (France), DeiC (Denmark), DFG(Germany), Jisc (UK) and SURF (The Netherlands)

Kristi Holmes, PhD, is a leader in knowledge management, FAIR data, and research impact at Northwestern University. She is Associate Dean for Knowledge Management and Strategy and Director of the Galter Health Sciences Library and Learning Center. She directs Informatics and Data Science within NUCATS and co‑leads its strategic management, and she serves as Chief of Knowledge Management in the Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine. Her research focuses on improving information access, supporting data‑driven discovery, and addressing emerging issues in AI and research. She is dedicated to shared knowledge ecosystems and evidence‑based approaches that strengthen transparency, collaboration, and research impact across the scientific community.

I have a long experience with PIDs, ITSM and metadata. Currently I work at CSC - IT Center for Science, Finland, as a service manager of PID Services and our CSC Services for Research and EOSC Finland Pilot Node Service Catalogs. In addition I am coordinating our National PID Working Group and DataCite Finland Consortium. PID policy and strategy work in organisational and national level and RDM are also close to my heart.

Laura Bredahl is the Bibliometrics and Research Impact Librarian at the University of Waterloo Library. She leads initiatives related to researcher identity management, persistent identifiers, and open scholarship. Laura has collaborated with campus partners to advance ORCID adoption and integrate PIDs into institutional workflows. Her work focuses on building sustainable systems that support research visibility and compliance while promoting open science principles.

I am part of the RDM information team at the University Library of LMU Munich, where I support researchers across all disciplines with services and infrastructure for managing their research data. My background combines library and information management with computer science, allowing me to work at the intersection of metadata, infrastructure, and user-oriented services.

Laurel (Laure) Haak (she/they) inordinately enjoys commons governance, particularly for its potential in integrating democratic participation throughout research and education. She currently serves as a scientist in the Field Day Lab at the University of Wisconsin, supporting efforts to spin out Open Game Data as a community-governed and -sustained research infrastructure. Laure brings experience in entrepreneurship, open science, infrastructure, governance, community engagement, and research policy from work at VeriMe Cooperative, Mighty Red Barn, ORCID, Discovery Logic/Thomson Reuters, US National Academies, and Science Magazine, as well as service on nonprofit boards including Phoenix Bioinformatics. Laure is a AAAS Fellow and has a PhD in Neuroscience from Stanford University Medical School and did postdoctoral research at the US National Institutes of Health.

Lauren Maxwell is an epidemiologist and mixed methods researcher focused on enabling the FAIR and equitable reuse of data and samples for pandemic preparedness. She leads the FAIR and Equitable Data and Sample Reuse Research Group at Universitätsklinikum Heidelberg and serves as a Senior Researcher with the Ecraid Foundation, where she addresses data interoperability and governance challenges within a European network of clinical trials. She leads data work packages for several EU-funded pandemic preparedness consortia, including ECRAID-Base, CoMeCT, CONTAGIO, and the BE READY European Partnership for Pandemic Preparedness, developing the metadata, governance frameworks, and policy intelligence needed to support federated, pandemic-ready data ecosystems. She co-chairs the CODATA-RDA Health Data Commons Working Group and is a co-author of the CODATA Cross-Domain Interoperability Framework (CDIF).

Lee has over 20 years of experience in the Australian Public Service with including over 14 years in research programs and policy including the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS). Key achievements include the 2015 Research Infrastructure Review, 2016 NRI Roadmap and the 2018 and 2020 Research Infrastructure Investment Plans.

Joining the ARC in 2020, worked on the ERA EI Review and preparations for ERA 2023. Since their discontinuation, his work has focussed on the development of a new approach to national research evaluation, improving the ARCs approach to Open Access and the use of Persistent Identifiers to inform insights into the Australian research sector.

Lombe Tembo is ORCID’s Senior Grant Program Officer and Engagement Lead, based in Zambia. She leads ORCID’s Global Participation Fund, supporting initiatives that advance the adoption and integration of persistent identifiers across research ecosystems, particularly in Africa and other underrepresented regions.

With a strong focus on community engagement, Lombe works closely with universities, research networks, and regional organisations to strengthen research visibility, interoperability, and open science practices. She has been instrumental in fostering collaborations that support the development of national and regional ORCID consortia, helping institutions embed ORCID into their research workflows and infrastructure.

Lombe brings extensive experience in stakeholder engagement, programme management, and capacity building. She is particularly passionate about enabling equitable participation in global research systems and supporting emerging research communities to increase the visibility and impact of their work.

Małgorzata works at the intersection of open science, research information management, and repository infrastructure, with a practical focus on how national and institutional systems actually get built and used. A recognised DSpace expert and specialist in research evaluation, she has designed and delivered solutions at national scale - previously as part of a state-owned software house building systems for Poland's Ministry of Science and Higher Education, and currently as project manager and client supervisor at PCG Academia. She serves on the DSpace Leadership Group and advises on policy instruments for research output management.

A biochemist and science enthusiast engaged in highly interdisciplinary research at the J. Heyrovský Institute of Physical Chemistry, Czech Academy of Sciences. His primary focus is on imaging immune cells, which raises key challenges in data management and related areas. Since 2022, he has served as the Research Data Alliance Ambassador for the Materials Science and Engineering domain, chairs the Czech Working Group for this domain within the EOSC CZ initiative, and leads a team focused on automating data management through workflows and electronic laboratory notebooks.

Director of Strategic Programs & Partnerships, DataCite
Director, Research Organization Registry (ROR)

Maria Praetzellis is the Associate Director of the UC Curation Center (UC3) at the California Digital Library. She drives the strategic planning and development of scholarly infrastructure supporting research data, including DMP Tool, Merritt, and EZID. Her work advances Open Science practices and research data management through open tools and services spanning digital preservation, data publication, curation, persistent identifiers, and data management planning.

With over 20 years of experience in scholarly publishing and biomedical research, I specialize in driving innovation and bridging the gap between startups, such as SciScore, and corporates. I bring a hands-on approach to product development, partnership building, and strategic advising.

Matt Buys is Executive Director of DataCite, a global non-profit organization providing persistent identifier (PID) infrastructure to support open and connected research. He leads the organization’s strategy across community governance, services, and operations, with a focus on strengthening trusted, sustainable, and community-driven scholarly infrastructure serving stakeholders in over 65 countries. 

With over 15 years of experience in the research and scholarly communications ecosystem, Matthew has worked closely with institutions, funders, and international partners to advance open science practices and collaborative infrastructure. 

He is also an active contributor to governance in the open research landscape, serving as Board Chair of the Center for Open Science, Vice Chair of the DOI Foundation, and a board member of FORCE11, supporting global efforts to promote openness, persistence, and trust in research.

Matthias Heni works at the TU Wien Library as an information manager, specializing in persistent identifiers (PIDs) and metadata. He is part of the PID.at Competence Center project team, is responsible for coordinating the Austrian national PID consortia for ORCID and DOI.

Maurice Vanderfeesten works at the intersection of research information infrastructure, open science and innovation. As Innovation Manager Research Services at the University Library of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, he develops services for Open Science, scholarly communication and research intelligence.

He also acts as a strategic advisor on Open Research Information at SURF, working on initiatives that strengthen open research information infrastructures and help connect information about Dutch publicly funded research in the public domain.

Maurice studied Information Sciences at Utrecht University and has worked across the Dutch research infrastructure landscape at SURF, TU Delft and VU Amsterdam, contributing to open access repositories, research data management and metadata standards used in infrastructures such as OpenAIRE.

His current work explores how AI can help make research more readable and accessible, supporting his broader mission to build a shared knowledge commons where scientific knowledge is accessible to everyone, now and for generations to come.

Megan Chenoweth is a senior associate librarian and metadata manager at ICPSR at the University of Michigan, where she oversees metadata quality and standards for over 20,000 social science research data collections.

Melroy currently works at the Australian Access Federation as Portfolio Manager - PIDs. He is a big fan of persistent identifiers and believes in their ability to enhance research and make it FAIR. The AAF also manages the Australian ORCID Consortium and as part of his day job Melroy interacts with consortium members to help them with their communication and implementation strategies and to realise benefits of their ORCID consortium membership. Melroy also collaborates with other like-minded individuals to further persistent identifiers and build a community of like-minded practitioners. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3522-7849

Paloma Marín Arraiza holds a degree in Physics and a Master's degree in Scientific Information and Communication, both from the University of Granada (Spain). She earned her PhD in Information Science from the State University of São Paulo (UNESP, Brazil), with a thesis on data modelling for enhanced publications. She also has specific training in data governance, data protection, and artificial intelligence. Before joining ORCID, she worked in research libraries in Germany and Austria, where she focused on managing non-textual research outputs and persistent identifiers. Since March 2020, she has been part of the ORCID team, where she currently serves as Associate Director of Engagement. In addition, she is a guest lecturer in Research Data Management and Data Stewardship courses in Spain and Austria, and serves on the editorial and review boards of several diamond open-access journals in the field of information science.

Paolo P. Gujilde has spent over a decade advancing the scholarly communication ecosystem across research organizations. He currently serves as Senior Strategist for the ORCID US Community at Lyrasis. In this role, Paolo partners with research institutions to support the implementation and adoption of ORCID—providing researchers with persistent identifiers that enhance visibility, attribution, and interoperability. He also advises organizations on best practices for advancing Open and FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) research. Paolo holds a graduate degree in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Learn more about his work at: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9758-5740

Patrick Hargitt is a senior product and technology leader with 30 years of experience across software engineering, platform architecture, and product strategy. He now works independently through Olive Turn, helping publishers navigate how AI and automation are reshaping what content must support. Previously at Wiley’s Atypon division, he led the roadmap and vision for the world’s most widely used scholarly publishing platform. Since 2015, his work has focused on advancing digital publishing platforms and workflows for scholarly communication. Patrick collaborates closely with publishing partners and industry groups to improve accessibility, engagement, and research impact.

Since 2020, Paul has served as DataCite’s outreach manager. In addition to his work in communications, he engages with the PID Network Germany project. Before joining DataCite, Paul was employed at the Helmholtz Open Science Office and various universities, where he contributed to the development of publication and data repositories. Paul holds an M.A. in North American Studies, Italian, and ethnology. As a committed advocate for Open Research, Paul aims to promote the concept of openness in scholarly communication.

Peter Mangiafico is a software engineer and product manager in Digital Library Systems and Services in Stanford University Libraries. Peter works on a number of projects, including the Stanford Digital Repository (SDR) and RIALTO (a research intelligence system). Before Stanford, he worked on projects with Visionlearning, the Marine Biological Lab in Woods Hole, MA, Harvard University, and the Advent of Complex Life NASA Astrobiology team. He worked for several years on the Encyclopedia of Life project, and has previously worked as a software engineer, project manager, high school teacher, and NASA researcher.

Richard Heidler is Director for Programme Evaluation at the German Research Foundation, where he leads analytical work on research funding, programmes, and careers. Trained in sociology and public administration, his work combines empirical and data-driven approaches to policy and evaluation, linking funding data to researchers, organisations, and outputs.

GEPRIS Historisch is more than a side project: working with historical funding data generates insights that inform and enrich the analysis of contemporary research systems.

His current work focuses on integrating heterogeneous data sources using PID to improve transparency and interoperability. As a long-time Wikipedia, Wikidata, and PID enthusiast he maintains identifiers across multiple systems, including ORCID, Wikidata, GND, and OpenAlex, and is always happy to acquire another one.

Information Manager for PID and Metadata Services at TIB Hannover

Rolf Krahl is responsible for scientific data management at Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie (HZB). HZB operates large scientific facilities, such as the BESSY II synchrotron light source and users from all over the world come to Berlin to use these facilities for their research. Rolf's task is to setup and manage a data repository for the preservation and long term archival of the scientific data collected at HZB's instruments. He has a background in mathematics. Before joining HZB, he has been developing software for scientific computing, mainly in the field of Computational Fluid Dynamics.

I am CEO of Research Space, which provides RSpace, a research orchestration platform that includes an electronic lab notebook and a sample management system. I participate actively in RDM and PID community activities, e.g. as Co-Chair of the RDA Working with PIDS in Tools IG, the Research Data Architectures in Institutions IG, and the MaLDReTH Map of Tools used in the Research Lifecycle, and through active participation in the PIDS for Instruments IG and the GORC WG. I have also been active in fostering interoperability between research tools, via engagement with the 20+ tools with which RSpace integrates, and projects such as in the US NSF Vertical Interoperability Conference award, and currently as Director of the NIH Vertical Interoperability Idea Lab. I also am a member of DataCite and Dryad advisory boards.

Dr. Sarah Coombs is the content coordinator for the Digital Competence Centre for Practice Oriented Research. She is also a researcher and Open Science advisor for Saxion University of Applied Science and the Netherlands Association of Universities of Applied Science. Open Science and all it entails is one of her very favourite things.

Sheila Rabun has worked in the academic library field since 2010, with a focus on digital workflows, agile project management, communicating technical information to diverse audiences, and advocating for interoperability in cultural heritage, research, and scholarly communication ecosystems. In her current role at Lyrasis, Sheila manages the ORCID US Community and the Lyrasis DataCite US Community, working with non-profit organizations across the US to leverage open persistent identifiers and shared open standards to make research and scholarly content more FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable).

Shelby Thaysen is the Scholarly Publishing Librarian at the University of Toronto Libraries Scholarly Communications and Copyright Office in Toronto, ON.

In this role, she is responsible for TSpace, the University of Toronto's institutional research repository, and the university’s open access journal publishing service hosted on the Open Journal Systems (OJS) platform.

Shelby is passionate about assisting researchers with their publishing, teaching, and research needs through her expertise related to copyright, open access, and information.

Simon Porter is VP of Research Futures at Digital Science and a current ORCID Board member. Based in the UK, he has spent the last decade advocating for "Research Information Citizenship", the shared responsibility of institutions, infrastructure providers, publishers, and researchers to maintain a genuinely open research ecosystem. His recent work focuses on measuring open infrastructure maturity through global PID benchmarking reports.

Product Manager, Identifier Services, ARDC
PID Nerd

Stefano oversees the Research Data Quality Office, which supports the University of Milan Open Science policies. He is the manager of the institutional repository of publications, and contributes to the institutional data repository Dataverse UNIMI and the diamond open-access publishing house Milano University Press.

Since 2018 I am working at TIB in the department for PIDs and Metadata Services. There, we are leading the German DOI and ORCID consortia and are dedicated to the dissemination of PIDs and improvement of their metadata. We are committed to new PID types and to an elaborated use of existing PIDs, e.g. to support the German national research data infrastructure. Before I came to TIB, I worked for the German Council for Scientific Information Infrastructure. This stakeholder committee focused on defining and improving the political conditions of research data management in Germany. As a trained historian in the history of economics and science I am still interested in historical issues.

Dr Suze Kundu is a recovering academic nanochemist and science communicator working at the intersection of research infrastructure, community engagement, and open science. She is a freelance Community Engagement Consultant, currently working for NASA’s Science Explorer (SciX) platform, supporting global engagement with open science infrastructure. Previously, she was Director of Researcher and Community Engagement at Digital Science, where she worked with international research communities to improve the discoverability and connectivity of research.

Sven Lieber works as data manager at The Royal Library of Belgium (KBR), where he supports the improvement of data quality, mainly by using computational methods and Linked Data. Sven is currently involved in the research infrastructure project MetaBelgica and the research project BELTRANS. For both projects, Sven helps to make data available according to the FAIR principles. He studied Computer Science at the University of Freiburg in Germany and pursued a PhD related to Knowledge Graphs at the University of Ghent in Belgium, where he was also involved in several interdisciplinary research projects at the IDLab research group

I am an IT professional at GWDG, Germany. I joined GWDG in 2005 and contributed to several international infrastructure and data management projects with the aim to build up research environments for various disciplines.

I am Chair of the Management Board of ePIC (‘PID Consortium for eResearch’) and I am the Coordinator of EOSC's Opportunity Area Expert Group on 'Persistent Identifiers'.

I hold a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Göttingen.

I also has 20+ years experience as an independent IT consultant specialising in small and medium-sized enterprises.

Toby GREEN has worked in scholarly, policy and professional publishing for more than 40 years, holding a variety of senior roles with OECD, Elsevier and Pergamon. Having published books, journals and data, he is now taming grey literature at Coherent Digital, which he co-founded in 2019. He is a regular speaker at publishing and librarian events including: Charleston, NISO, ALPSP, OASPA, SSP, and Fiesole. He is on the Board of Annual Reviews and was previously a member of the Royal Society of Chemistry Publishing Board and Chair and Council Member for ALPSP.

Torsten works at the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB) in Hannover and is a project team member of PID4NFDI, a Basic Service within Germany's National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) focused on persistent identifiers. He holds a PhD in History of Science from Humboldt University of Berlin and has worked across a range of research and research data management projects. His current work within PID4NFDI spans training material development, tool development, community outreach, and documentation, with a particular focus on supporting research communities in understanding and adopting PIDs.

Tristan Kuehn is Product Lead, Discovery Services at the Digital Research Alliance of Canada. Tristan manages Lunaris, the Alliance's Canadian data discovery service; serves as technical lead for the DataCite Canada Consortium; and serves as staff liaison for the Alliance's Discovery and Metadata Expert Group.

Vincent de Boer is an Assistant Professor in Human and Animal Physiology at Wageningen University & Research. His research addresses fundamental questions in physiology, how muscles age, how metabolism fails, and how mitochondria respond to disease and stress. He combines wet lab expertise with data science and software engineering, developing open-source tools and methods that make physiological data more reproducible, transparent, and reusable. He is a core contributor to PyLabRobot, an open-source framework for lab automation. Alongside his research, he is committed to teaching the next generation of life scientists to work with data rigorously and openly. He is also involved in initiatives at the intersection of open hardware and sustainability, including efforts to reduce electronic waste in research infrastructure. He trained at Harvard Medical School and has a background in analytical chemistry and molecular biology.

Xu Zhoufeng, biodiversity informatics engineer, currently works in South China Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Pay attention to the application of citizen science, object identification, data science engineering, and AI in the field of biodiversity.