Held on 27-28 October, in Salzburg and online, the 2023 CODATA General Assembly elected a strong and diverse Executive Committee and approved eight Task Groups and one Working Group. The full summary of the General Assembly, including presentations, results of voting and the recordings can be consulted on codata.org.
For the first time in CODATA’s 57 year history, CODATA has elected a female president, and the overall gender balance is 7-8 (female-male) for the elected members is the best ever. This is also the highest number of Officers/ExComm members nominated by International Scientific Unions in at least the last ten years, which shows a confidence in CODATA mission to engage with data issues from a range of scientific fields. Coming from IUPAC, Secretary General Richard Hartshorn has been serving as a member of the Executive Committee since 2018 and is now elected Vice President, together with Daisy Selematsela, nominated by South Africa. Mercè Crosas was elected President, nominated by USA, DDI Alliance, GO FAIR Foundation.
The following CODATA Task Groups were approved:
- Data Systems and Services for Crisis Situations (DSTS-CS)
- Advancing Data Science for Sustainability
- Geographic Indications and Sustainability (GIES-TG)
- Data Ethics Task Group (DE-TG)
- Data-Driven Social Change Towards Society Promoting Cognitively Healthy Aging
- Citizen Generated Data for the SDGs
- Digital Representation of Units of Measure (DRUM-TG)
- FAIR Data for Disaster Risk Research
The CODATA General Assembly took place during International Data Week (IDW), co-hosted by CODATA and the Research Data Alliance (RDA). IUPAC was an active contributor through the involvement of CPCDS and community collaborators. Some highlights are noted below; further summaries of these activities will be forthcoming in Chemistry International and other articles.
IUPAC’s WorldFAIR Chemistry project (IUPAC project 2022-012-1-024) was the hosting organizer of two multi-disciplinary sessions at IDW:
- Beyond FAIR: Reusing Chemical Data Across-disciplines with CARE, TRUST, and Openness
- Describing Chemical, Physical and Biological samples digitally: Seeking harmonization
Brief descriptions have been written up in the recent WorldFAIR newsletter. With thanks to Fatima Mustafa, IUPAC WorldFAIR Chemistry-Project Coordinator, to manage the session organization for these in collaboration with several other WorldFAIR case studies, including Nanomaterials, GeoChemistry and Agricultural Biodiversity, and RDA Interest Groups, including Chemistry Photons & Neutrons and Physical Samples. Other collaborators included PARC (Partnership for the Assessment of Risk of Chemicals), PSDI (Physical Sciences Data Infrastructure) in the UK, and the NFDI4Chem data infrastructure project in Germany. IUPAC colleagues who presented or moderated included Ian Bruno, Stuart Chalk, Jeremy Frey, and Leah McEwen.
The CODATA Task Group on Digital Units of Measure (see also IUPAC project 2022-009-1-100) hosted a session that featured talks from Richard Hartshorn and Stuart Chalk, who are members of the CODATA DRUM group along with Jeremy Frey.
IUPAC is also invited to participate in a new RDA Working Group on “Harmonised terminologies and schemas for FAIR data in materials science and related domains”, described in an IDW poster: “Review and Alignment of Domain-Level Ontologies for Materials Science and Chemistry” that references the IUPAC Gold Book.