The last breakout slot of Thirteenth RDA Plenary Meeting saw a joint meeting between some long-running groups with a shared interest in metadata: the Metadata Interest Group, the Metadata Standards Catalog Working Group and the Data In Context Interest Group.

I am not the typical early career researcher. I am not particularly young; nor is this my first time attending an RDA plenary. I am, however, at an early stage in what I consider to be my third career - working as a PhD researcher at the Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS) in the Netherlands. Thanks to the RDA Europe Early Career Researcher grant program, I was able to attend the 13th RDA Plenary in Philadelphia, where I connected with the work of RDA and its members at a deeper level than I have before.

Being an early career researcher in research data management, with a background in the social sciences and humanities no less, comes with certain advantages when attending an RDA plenary meeting for the first time, especially when that meeting’s overarching topic is data and responsibility.

The CODATA-RDA Research Data Science Schools provide Early Career Researchers with the opportunity to meet their colleagues and learn relevant Data Science skills. We actively encourage students to use their learning as an opportunity to create new collaborations and generate new research.

Just like I did, I’m sure you’ve head of COST and the COST actions many times. COST stands for European Cooperation in Science and Technology and is a funding organisation supporting the creation of research networks called COST actions. When reading about COST a few things stand out: it offers open spaces for researchers to collaborate and has a bottom up approach, meaning that the researchers are the ones setting up the collaboration networks based on their interests and expertise by submitting a proposal to the COST Open Calls.