User:Daniel Mietchen/Biographical sketch

A video on open research, co-created by Daniel in 2011. See here for an overview of his uploads to Wikimedia Commons.

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Daniel Mietchen is a data scientist working on opening up the ways in which research is being done, scrutinized and integrated into our collective knowledge and practice. Trained in Biophysics at Humboldt University in Berlin, he did a PhD in Physics at Saarland University, focusing on applications of Magnetic Resonance Microscopy to biological systems and their evolution.

Thematically, his research ranges from fossils and embryonic development to cold hardiness, music perception, brain morphometry, vocal learning, invasion biology and more recently to biodiversity informatics, semantic integration, research ethics and data science more broadly. This entails the transdisciplinary collaboration with researchers from around the globe, which sparked his early interest in the integration of open research and education workflows with the web, particularly by way of collaborative platforms like wikis. Within the open research community, his focus is on data sharing — especially in response to emergencies, to enhance reproducibility and to contribute to sustainable development — as well as on streamlining publication workflows all around the research cycle, on the interplay of research policy and infrastructure and on facilitating the reuse of open access and open science materials in educational contexts like Wikimedia platforms, to which he contributes with special emphasis on open licenses and technical interoperability with research-related resources.

He has worked at the Korea Basic Science Institute, at the Fraunhofer Institute for Biomedical Engineering, at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, at the University of Jena, at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, at the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the University of Virginia, and he served as Wikimedian in Residence on Open Science at the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany.

He led a team that received one of the Accelerating Science Awards for their Open Access Media Importer Bot in 2013. The project later expanded to integrate scholarly publications more closely with Wikimedia platforms like Wikisource, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata, which helped spawn WikiCite and the Initiative for Open Citations. He is part of the team that was named SPARC Innovator in June 2016 for their development of the journal Research Ideas and Outcomes (or RIO for short), which allows to publish research from all stages of the research cycle across all fields of research, and which maps all publications to the most closely related Sustainable Development Goals. He served on the European Commission expert group on FAIR data and is part of the team that develops Scholia, an open-source tool that is based on Wikidata and allows to profile and browse networks spanning between the scholarly literature, researchers, research institutions and other elements of the research landscape.

All of this informs his current activities as a researcher at the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries, at the FIZ Karlsruhe, at the Ronin Institute and at the Institute for Globally Distributed Open Research and Education (IGDORE).

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Daniel Mietchen is a biophysicist interested in integrating open research and education workflows with the web, particularly through open licensing, open standards, open collaboration, public version histories and forkability. With research activities spanning from the subcellular to the organismic level, from fossils to developing embryos, from biodiversity informatics to data science more broadly and how this all fits with sustainable development, he experienced multiple shades of the research cycle and a variety of approaches to collaboration, sharing and reproducibility in research contexts. He has also been contributing to Wikipedia and its sister projects for about two decades and is actively engaged in increasing the interactions between the Wikimedia and research communities, particularly around Wikidata. All of this informs his current activities as a researcher at the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries, at the FIZ Karlsruhe, at the Ronin Institute and at the Institute for Globally Distributed Open Research and Education (IGDORE).

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