Dr. Cees Hof (DANS-KNAW) started his academic career as an aquatic ecologist and received his MSc degree (Cum Laude) from the Radboud University in Nijmegen (NL). Thereafter he moved into animal systematics, palaeontology and geochemistry for his PhD research at the University of Amsterdam (NL) and postdoctoral research at the University of Bristol (UK). His research concerned the evolutionary history of stomatopods (mantis shrimps) and included the description of new fossil species, the revision of historic material, phylogenetic reconstructions and experimental taphonomic research. After this period of fundamental research, Cees became the coordinator of the European Network for Biodiversity Information (ENBI) and for more than 10 years he was leading and coordinating the development of the Dutch branch of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). Currently Cees works at data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS), the data-institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), where he is responsible for cross-disciplinary project acquisition and liaison officer for the life sciences. Areas of special interest are metadata, Knowledge Organisation Systems (KOS), Research Data Management (RDM) and Open Science (OS). As an honorary researcher Cees is connected to the “Oertijdmuseum Boxtel” in the Netherlands where he continues his research, at a modest pace, on the stomatopod fossil record.