HMC’s Scientific Advisory Board provides valuable advice for further development
Much praise for the Helmholtz Metadata Collaboration, but also valuable hints for its further development is the outcome of the recent meeting of HMC's Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) last Friday. The members of the SAB emphasised that HMC could become an example for the implementation of a functional FAIR data infrastructure. Many organisations and institutions outside the Helmholtz Association could also benefit from this. Important first steps on this path have already been taken, despite HMC's complex environment. The ongoing and planned interactions between the individual HMC components, such as the subject-specific hubs, the projects as well as participating Helmholtz Centres, are the promising basis for this. At the same time, external collaborations, for example with the National Research Data Infrastructure or the European Open Science Cloud, must be expanded. Therefore, HMC should also clearly show its initial successes and results to the outside world.
The members of the SAB spent around four hours discussing with representatives of the HMC boards and units. In addition to a presentation of the progress made so far, they also discussed the project calls in the area of metadata that HMC coordinates for the Helmholtz Innovation and Networking Fund.
Like the first SAB meeting in June this year, the most recent one was held online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. At the end, HMC spokesperson Sören Lorenz thanked the SAB members for the constructive exchange: "Of course we are happy when the international experts in the SAB confirm our approach. But the additional suggestions are actually even more important for us. They help us to improve our work and thus to follow the path we have chosen even more successfully".
Members of the Scientific Advisory Board are:
Eva Mendes, Universidad Carlos III, Madrid, Spain (chair)
Juan Bicarregui, Science & Technology Facilities Council, UK
Mercè Crosas, Secretary of Transparency and Open Government, Government of Catalonia
Martin Fenner, Technical Information Library, Hanover
Carole Goble, University of Manchester, UK
Wolfram Horstmann, Göttingen State and University Library (SUB)
