Joy Owango and Natasha Simons Join ROR Steering Group

ROR is excited to welcome two new members to its Steering Group this year: Joy Owango from the Training Centre in Communication (TCC Africa) and Natasha Simons from the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC).

About Joy Owango

Joy Owango is Founding Director of the Training Centre in Communication (TCC Africa), the first African-based training centre to teach effective communication skills to scientists. TCC Africa is in partnership and housed at the University of Nairobi, Kenya, and provides capacity support in improving African researchers output and visibility through in scholarly and science communication.

Joy has successfully created Global North–South collaborations, where the Centre promotes Open Science dialogue and provides equitable access to open-source research discovery solutions to African governments and their respective academic communities. Through these partnerships, TCC Africa actively creates awareness through advocacy on Open Science in Africa. Joy also currently sits on the Steering Committee of the International Science Council’s project on the future of scientific publishing.

About Natasha Simons

Natasha Simons is Associate Director, Data & Services, for the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC). Based in Brisbane, she leads a team who are passionate about building infrastructure to enable FAIR data and delivering ARDC’s suite of national information infrastructure services (persistent identifiers, vocabularies, metadata, and discovery portals). Natasha collaborates internationally to solve challenges that improve FAIR data infrastructure, policies, skills, and practices.

About the ROR Steering Group

Established in late 2019, the ROR Steering Group is an advisory body that supports the registry’s strategic planning and decision-making activities and reflects ROR’s global community of stakeholders. Group members provide feedback on ROR strategy and help drive awareness and adoption of ROR IDs through their respective networks and communities. The Steering Group comprises ROR’s operating organizations (California Digital Library, Crossref, and DataCite), who serve in a permanent capacity, as well as members representing external organizations, who serve rotating terms of 2-4 years.

As Joy and Natasha join the 2023 cohort, two members of the group’s original cohort—Daniel Hook from Digital Science, and Clifford Lynch from the Coalition for Networked Information—will be cycling off. We are grateful to Daniel and Cliff for their guidance and support since ROR’s early days!

The complete current ROR Steering Group cohort for 2023 is:

• Matt Buys, DataCite (permanent member)
• John Chodacki, California Digital Library (CDL) (permanent member)
• Lautaro Matas, LA Referencia
• Ritsuko Nakajima, Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST)
• Joy Owango, Training Centre in Communication (TCC Africa)
• Ed Pentz, Crossref (permanent member)
• Judy Ruttenberg, Association of Research Libraries (ARL)
• Kathleen Shearer, Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR)
• Chris Shillum, ORCID
• Natasha Simons, Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC)

In addition to the Steering Group, ROR engages community input and participation through a larger community advisory group. This group, which is open to anyone, meets regularly (currently bimonthly) to discuss ROR activities, share about implementations, and give feedback on upcoming work. Those who are interested in participating in the group should email info@ror.org to join.