Simon Hodson

Simon Hodson is Executive Director of CODATA http://codata.org/, an organisation that exists to promote international collaboration for Open scientific data.  Supporting the mission of ICSU, the International Council for Science, CODATA aims to strengthen international science for the benefit of society by promoting improved scientific and technical data management and use.  

Related to this role, he sits on numerous project Steering Boards and strategic Working Groups in the area of research data.  These include the GEO Data Sharing Working Group http://www.earthobservations.org/geoss_dsp.shtml and the Scientific Advisory Board of CESSDA, the European data infrastructure for the social sciences.  He is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Dryad data repository http://datadryad.org, a not-for-profit initiative to make the data underlying scientific publications discoverable, freely reusable, and citable.  

As well as these strategic activities, Simon is directly involved in hands-on activities and research in a number of data related areas.  He is co-chair of the RDA-WDS Data Publication Working Group on Cost Recovery for Data Centres http://www.icsu-wds.org/community/working-groups/data-publication/publishing-costs; co-chair of the CODATA-RDA Data Working Group for Data Science Summer Schools in Developing Countries, which is building in the first instance on CODATA partnerships in Kenya; and co-chair of the RDA Working Group to build a ‘BioSharing Registry: connecting data policies, standards & databases in life sciences’.  He is an expert on data policy issues and research data management and has recently contributed to reports on data policy issues for the Danish e-Infrastructure Group and on research data management for a consortium of UK research institutions.

Simon has a strong research background, as well as considerable project and programme management experience: from 2009 to 2013, as Programme Manager, he led two successive phases of Jisc's innovative Managing Research Data programme in the UK.