Hello, my name is Anja Smit and joined DANS, Dutch Centre of Expertise and National Repository and for research data in 2022 as the Director. DANS is an Institute of the Royal Academy of Sciences and the National Research Council in The Netherlands.

I bring to DANS a background in research libraries of over three decades in The Netherlands and in the international arena. In my last position of Library Director at Utrecht University, my colleagues and I were very active in the area of open science, including of course, FAIR Data. To me, libraries developing services around research data is a very logical development: just think of the metadata expertise of research libraries, and the broad experience in making research output FAIR. Combining that expertise and experience with the more (domain-) specific specialists of data makes a lot of sense to me. 

For that reason, open science and FAIR data is a prominent item on the agenda of LIBER, the European Network of research libraries, in which I serve as secretary general. 

DANS of course is first and foremost a national repository, serving researchers in The Netherlands – and I am sure the same is true for other similar organisations. At the same time, we strongly believe in international collaboration to be able to serve researchers, many of whom work across countries. So DANS’ colleagues have extensive networks in which they work on projects. CESSDA is one of the most important for DANS because the SSH-domain is a specific focus area for us.

What struck me most since I joined DANS I think, is the huge ambition and drive of our colleagues in an area were there is still so much to do and develop for the research community. A lot is achieved with very modest and in many cases temporary funding, this is really extraordinary! Collaboration of course, is key, and I do hope to be able to contribute to developing and connecting networks across Europe.