It is with both sadness and excitement that I will be leaving ORCID, to join DataCite as their new Executive Director. It’s a wonderful opportunity, and I am pleased that I will be staying within the wider digital infrastructure, and will have the opportunity to continue working with ORCID, collaborating to build the open research information infrastructure.
I will really miss the ORCID team, which has become a family to me. It is difficult to put into words how much of an impact the people at ORCID have had in my life. It is with the support and trust of my ORCID family that I have been able to grow and develop as an individual. I thank you all for your friendship and colleagueship over the years. I will continue to hold these relationships dearly.
When I joined ORCID in 2015, I wrote about how excited I was to be joining a “plumbing company.” Since then, ORCID has become so much more. We have helped build a global community that has started to transform how research information is collected and shared. Everything we do at ORCID is in service of our underlying belief that, by working together with all sectors of the global research community — disparate as their priorities and cultures often are — we can facilitate conversations that help increase the openness and reliability of research information.
During my time at ORCID, I have traveled around the world to engage directly with you, the incredible people who make up our community. We rely on your commitment to realise our vision, of a world where all who participate in research, scholarship, and innovation are uniquely identified and connected to their contributions across disciplines, borders, and time. I am privileged to have had the opportunity to work with so many of you.
Building persistent global research infrastructure is no small endeavour. From a global perspective, the community largely recognises the interplay between ORCID adoption by researchers and implementation of ORCID in research workflows. Both are necessary to achieve our ultimate goal of streamlined and open information-sharing. This being said, we also recognise that organisations want to contribute to and gain value from information interoperability in different ways, so over my time at ORCID we have worked to develop strategies to enable collaboration and build communities of practice.
I am proud of ORCID’s achievements over the past few years, I thank everyone in our community for your support and commitment, and I look forward to continuing to work with you to achieve our shared goal in my new role.
