Simon Hodson

Simon Hodson has been Executive Director of CODATA since August 2013.

Simon is an expert on data policy issues and research data management. He has contributed to influential reports on Current Best Practice for Research Data Management Policies and to the Science International Accord on Open Data in a Big Data World.  Most recently he chaired the European Commission’s Expert Group on FAIR Data which produced the report Turning FAIR into Reality https://doi.org/10.2777/1524.

As part of his CODATA role, Simon is closely involved in an ISC and CODATA initiative to improve the coordination of standards for data integration and interoperability for interdisciplinary research and in the coordination of the CODATA Data Policy Committee.

Additionally, Simon leads or participants in numerous projects, Working Groups and Steering Groups. Currently (May 2019), this includes the following roles:

Project Director, African Open Science Platform Project;

Member of the Scientific Advisory Board of CESSDA ERIC, the European data infrastructure for the social sciences.

In recent years, Simon has been a co-chair (2015-2018) of the GEO Data Sharing Working Group, to which CODATA has made a longterm contribution; co-chair of the OECD Global Science Forum and CODATA Project on Sustainable Business Models for Research Data Repositories; a member of the Board of Directors of the Dryad Data Repository (2012-2018), a not-for-profit initiative to make the data underlying scientific publications discoverable, freely reusable, and citable.

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 successful phases of Jisc’s innovative Managing Research Data programme in the UK.