Springer Nature’s annual one-day conference brings together researchers from all stages of their career to discuss advances and opportunities in research data. Primarily aimed at enabling early career researchers to best utilise their research data in improving their research, talks include those from on-going research projects, industry leaders and early-career researchers, discussing all things research data from across all of the life and social sciences. The conference is held in partnership with the Welcome Trust and followed by thousands of researchers world-wide through social media. In 2016 the conference hashtag (#scidata16) received more than 10 million impressions and all videos and slides from the conference are made freely accessible after the event, through Youtube, Figshare and the post-event website. You can find out more about this year’s conference here: http://go.nature.com/scidata17