The Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS) recognised for building the Arab region’s first open interdisciplinary social science research data archive.
London, 6 October 2026. The Selection Committee is pleased to announce Dr. Seteney Shami and Ms. Nada Chaya as joint winners of the 2026 Sarah Jones Award for exceptional contribution to fostering collaboration in Open Science. The award, presented every two years, recognises individuals whose work has driven meaningful, lasting change in open science, often in places where building that culture is hardest. This year’s winners were honoured at the Research Data Alliance (RDA) 27th Plenary Meeting in London on 6 October 2026.
Together they built the first interdisciplinary open-access social science research data archive in the Arab region in order to promote the longterm preservation of datasets per the norms and practices of data management. The archive is available to both individual researchers and institutions.
The ACSS Dataverse now holds close to 200 datasets and 8 sub-Dataverses, ranging from de-identified survey microdata to shapefiles, all freely available to anyone who registers. Rather than accept open self-deposit, the ACSS Dataverse chose to curate submissions which was a deliberate trade-off, preferring quality over scale. In addition, the ACSS is contributing to the internationalization of the Dataverse by localizing language packs to enable Arabic script. The impact of this effort reaches well beyond Arabic and contributes to a wider project to adapt Dataverse’s software for right-to-left scripts.
The ACSS Dataverse works in partnership with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, whose Odum Institute and Research Data Management Core, with early funding from the Carnegie Corporation of New York (now the Andrew Carnegie Foundation), supported and helped launch and develop the initiative.
Along with providing research infrastructure through the Dataverse, the ACSS organized more than two dozen training workshops on the principles, best practices and tools of research data management and sharing. These workshops were organized in collaboration with numerous universities and research centres in the region and, so far, have reached more than 300 researchers and information specialists across the region. Partnerships and collaborations and strong relationships are a pillar of their work.
Much of this work has been carried out against a backdrop of extraordinary disruption and multiple and prolonged crises. In response, Dr. Shami established ACSS branches in Jordan and the United States to safeguard continuity. Their nominators describe this less as an obstacle overcome once than as a condition they work within, consistently and without fanfare.
In their own words
“Their perseverance through extraordinary economic and geopolitical hardships is amazing, and the research data community is lucky to have these advocates in our community.” Jonathan Crabtree, Ph.D., Director, UNC Research Data Management Core
“I have benefited from their perseverance, their ability to forge professional relationships, and their remarkable good humour.” Charles Kurzman, Stadter Professor of Sociology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
As winners, Dr. Shami and Ms. Chaya received a physical award, a certificate, and a listing on the RDA Sarah Jones Award website, alongside access to a fund to support further activity in their field such as capacity-building and cross-community engagement.
“Seteney and Nada didn’t just build an archive, they built the conditions under which one could survive trust, training, and a network of people willing to sustain it after they’d moved on. That’s exactly the kind of contribution this award exists to recognise.” The Sarah Jones Award Selection Committee: Kevin Ashley, Ingrid Dillo, Rosie Hicks and Cathrin Stöver.
Our inaugural winner in 2024 was Aleksandra Lazić, then a PhD candidate at the University of Belgrade and a co-founder of REPOPSI, the Repository of Psychological Instruments in Serbian.
Aleksandra has a message for this year’s winner “Dear New Winner, I am glad to pass on the Sarah Jones award to you. I don’t know who you are yet, but I know Sarah would have loved to see you recognised, and she would have called you a bright star. Lean on the RDA community, which has been so generous to me, and step into the next two years together, in the spirit of open science and collaboration. I can’t wait to see what you do next. Congratulations!”
The panel also wants to recognise our other shortlisted candidates. Eduarda Centeno is a postdoctoral researcher and Executive Director of the Brazilian Reproducibility Network at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Jenny Molloy is an Assistant Research Professor at the University of Cambridge and a Group Leader at the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology in Trieste. Congratulations to you both, and thank you for your contributions to open science.
For more information on the Sarah Jones Award and to see the previous winners: https://www.rd-alliance.org/sarah-jones-award/
About Sarah Louise Jones
Sarah was born in Blackpool, United Kingdom in 1982. After a first degree in German and Economic History, she studied digital information management, which included work in archives. She worked at HATII (Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute) at the University of Glasgow for 15 years on various Research Data Management and digital preservation projects and services. For most of this time she was part of the Digital Curation Centre where she covered different roles including Associate Director. She played a significant part in every aspect of the DCC’s work – training, consultancy, publications, online services and a wide variety of European projects – as well as being part of its management team during a period of significant change.
After leaving DCC in 2020, she worked at GÉANT as their EOSC Engagement Manager. Her role was to support National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) with Open Science. Alongside her roles at DCC and GÉANT, she also served as independent expert for the European Commission on expert groups for FAIR data, the Transport Research Cloud and the EOSC Executive Board. She was elected twice to serve on the EOSC Association Board. Sarah served as a member of the RDA Technical Advisory Board from 2020 and in May 2023 she was elected to the Research Data Alliance Council, the executive board of RDA. Sarah passed away prematurely in December 2023.
We at GÉANT continue to miss Sarah terribly. We are grateful to the RDA for establishing the Sarah Jones Award in her memory and we are proud to support this excellent initiative.
Tributes to Sarah’s memory: [From the GÉANT community] [From the RDA community] [The ‘Sarah Jones (In Memoriam)’ FAIR Data Podcast]
