Jamie Wittenberg is the Assistant Dean for Research and Innovation Strategies at the University of Colorado Boulder Libraries. Her portfolio includes acquisitions, digitization, discovery, cataloging, collection management, interlibrary loan, IT, metadata, preservation. Wittenberg’s professional interests include community-developed open source software, research information management, digital preservation, and data curation. Her research includes work on automating open access policy implementation, publishing digital 3D objects, and building infrastructure to support sharing and preservation research data.

Irina Sens is the Deputy Director and head of Library Services at TIB – the German National Library of Science and Technology. She led the German project “Registration of Scientific primary data” which was responsible for the introduction of DOIs for research data. She is strongly involved in the German National Research Data Initiative (NFDI).

Dedicated to public service and knowledge access, John Aspler has experience working in research and public library contexts in Canada. He graduated from McGill University with a PhD in Neuroscience in 2021, where he worked on several projects about media discourse and neurodevelopmental disabilities. John is currently the Manager of the Canadian Persistent Identifier (PID) Community at the Canadian Research Knowledge Network, supporting the use of PIDs like ORCID iDs and DOIs across the country.

Paola Carolina Bongiovani coordinates the Open Access Committee and Management Unit at the National University of Rosario (UNR), Argentina. She is responsible for the Academic Data Repository (RDA-UNR), the Institutional Repository (RepHipUNR), and the UNR Journals Portal. Paola researches and teaches on scholarly communication and open science. A member of the Expert Committee of Argentina’s National System of Digital Repositories, which she previously coordinated (2009–2011), she has contributed to national legislation and led consulting projects in Argentina and Uruguay, and supports capacity building and regional initiatives including LA Referencia.

José Benito is Head of Institutional Repositories at the CERN IT Department, overseeing the Research Data Management Platform, InvenioRDM, and services including Zenodo, the CERN Open Data Portal, CERN’s institutional repository, and long-term preservation projects. He coordinates CERN’s contributions to the European Open Science Cloud and serves on CERN’s Open Science Steering Board. José is an advocate for Open Science and open-source technologies, actively contributing to international initiatives such as EOSC Task Forces, OpenAIRE, and Make Data Count.

Owen Iyoha is the CEO of the Eko-Konnect Research and Education Initiative. He oversees infrastructure development, capacity building, and advocacy to develop the research and education network in Nigeria. Owen also advocates for Open Science, Open Access, and other open paradigms and infrastructure necessary to support scholarly and research outputs. Eko-Konnect currently serves as the consortium lead for DataCite and ORCID in Nigeria.

Merilen Ivask-Oprelianska is a senior research database specialist at the University of Tartu Library, where she coordinates the migration of the institutional research data repository DATADOI from DSpace to Dataverse. Her work focuses on this repository and related research data management, including configuration, metadata, and user interface customization. She has contributed to international collaborations, brings a perspective grounded in hands-on work with research data infrastructure, and is also involved in institutional open science working group activities.

Rachael Kotarski is Associate University Librarian for Digital Strategy and Services at the University of Chicago Library, where her current portfolio encompasses Library systems and IT, repositories, discovery, digital scholarship and digitization. Rachael has spent more than 15 years in National and Academic Libraries, always with a focus on infrastructure for open scholarship, and as an active participant in community initiatives on national and international infrastructures for identifiers in research. Other areas of interest are collections as data, accessibility, and digital literacy.

Madison Langseth is a science data manager at the U.S. Geological Survey. She develops tools and workflows to make the data publication process more efficient and FAIR for USGS researchers and data managers. Madison also promotes data management best practices through her leadership of various communities of practice (CoP), including the USGS’s Community for Data Integration Data Management Working Group and Metadata Reviewers CoP.

Ritsuko Nakajima is Senior Researcher at the National Institute of Informatics (NII) in Japan. She previously led information services at the Japan Science and Technology Agency, including a journal aggregator, DOI registration, data repositories, and a researcher directory. Ritsuko has promoted open access to outputs from JST-funded projects. Since October 2025, she has been involved in conceptualizing NII’s next-generation scholarly platform and promoting the effective use of research information infrastructure and Open Science.

Natasha Simons is Director, National Coordination, for the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC). She leads a large, talented team of Program Managers and Subject Matter Experts contributing to deliver ARDC’s strategic Research Data Commons initiatives. Based at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Natasha is passionate about bringing out the best in people and creating high performing teams. She has a high international profile in the area of research data infrastructure and enjoys collaborating to solve common data challenges, particularly through the global Research Data Alliance. Natasha holds a number of positions on international Boards and is co-chair of the DataCite Community Engagement Steering Group and the APAC Expert Group.

Veronique Stoll leads Recherche Data Gouv, France’s national research data infrastructure, providing a sovereign platform for the deposit, publication, discovery, and reuse of research data. She also serves as the National Chief Research Data Officer at the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research, where she drives national policy on research data, with a particular focus on persistent identifiers. Veronique is particularly involved in the French DataCite consortium.

Joel Torres is an Open Science specialist with 30 years of experience developing knowledge management solutions for academic and research institutions. Throughout his career, he has led over 620 projects in data management, digital publishing, repositories, citizen science, and educational platforms. Joel coordinates dPyx and OpenDots, two open, free software initiatives that support hundreds of institutions across Latin America in project evaluation, training, and certification in open access, open technologies, and scholarly communication.