As published in: https://news.feinberg.northwestern.edu/2024/04/18/holmes-to-co-chair-nih-open-data-initiative/

Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) are stepping into a dynamic leadership position in the third year of the National Institutes of Health Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative (GREI) as Co-Chair through Zenodo.

Coordinated by the NIH Office of Data Science Strategy the GREI is a unique competition and cooperation model of strategic partnerships between seven generalist repositories aimed at enhancing research data sharing and promoting openness. The GREI is tasked with furthering the biomedical data ecosystem by establishing a framework of consistent capabilities, services, metrics, and social infrastructure across repositories.

Since its launch, the program has made significant progress in fostering collaboration through action-focused working groups dedicated to use cases, metadata and search, metrics, and community engagement. Guided by a collaborative leadership structure, these concentrated initiatives advance community engagement and improved interoperability across generalist repositories through interactive trainings and workshops and several collaborative works, including data citation best practices for repositories, metadata recommendations, and a use cases catalog. 

The co-chairs will work with NIH to support project coordination, workplan implementation, and meeting facilitation. They include:

• Sonia Barbosa, Associate Director of Dataverse Support, Data Curation, and the Murray Archive, Harvard University
• Traci Snowden, Product Manager, Mendeley Data and Digital Commons Research Data Management, Elsevier
• Kristi Holmes, PhD, associate dean for knowledge management and strategy, Director of Galter Health Sciences Library, and professor of Preventive Medicine.

Zenodo joined the GREI in 2022 through a partnership between CERN and Northwestern University, led by Holmes and Tim Smith, PhD, Coordinator of the Open Quantum Institute and of IT Communication and Outreach at CERN, and featuring expertise and leadership from both sites. Over the past several years, CERN and Northwestern have partnered with the broader InvenioRDM Open Source Community to develop the InvenioRDM software, a user experience software for repositories. Serving as both the new back end of Zenodo and a standalone institutional repository solution, InvenioRDM supports researchers and research communities with FAIR practices, credit, sharing, and discovery of a wide range of digital objects reaching far beyond data.

“Zenodo continues to be a leader in open science infrastructure and practices. We’re thrilled that Zenodo will serve as a year 3 Co-Chair as we continue to take creative steps toward our shared objectives and use our distinctive expertise drive a more open and mutually beneficial ecosystem,” said Smith.

“I am excited about the unique opportunities that are fostered through GREI. As our GREI program evolves, so does our ability to nurture a more dynamic, open, and equitable ecosystem to advance research and foster innovation,” Holmes said.  “We’re excited about working with the GREI partners to make strides toward our shared goals.”

About Zenodo

Zenodo is a generalist repository developed under the European OpenAIRE program and operated by CERN. Since its launch over 10 years ago, Zenodo has served as an open and dependable home for global science, enabling researchers to share and preserve research outputs of any size, any format, and from any discipline.

Zenodo is built on the InvenioRDM software, a turnkey, scalable, and top-of-class user experience software for repositories. Serving as both the new back end of Zenodo and a standalone institutional repository solution, InvenioRDM supports researchers and research communities with FAIR practices, credit, sharing, and discovery of a wide range of digital objects.