Barend Mons appointed Chair of European Commission’s High Level Expert Group
Professor Barend Mons has been appointed Chair of the Commission High Level Expert Group "European Open Science Cloud", initiated by the European Commission, DG Research and Innovation.
Barend Mons is professor in Biosemantics at the Human Genetics department of the Leiden University Medical Center, is Head of Node for ELIXIR-NL at the Dutch Techcentre for Life Sciences, Integrator Life Sciences at the Netherlands eScience Center, and member of the Leiden Centre of Data Science.
The EU’s High Level Expert Group will provide strategic advice to the European Commission on research data sharing, data stewardship and data reuse in the context of the implementation of the ‘European Open Science Cloud' - part of the Commission Digital Single Market Strategy. The advice will help set the strategic direction of this initiative, including broad implementation criteria, the mechanisms of sustainable funding and the governance of a data sharing and reuse infrastructure for Europe. The group will also prepare the agenda for a wider meeting of e-infrastructures stakeholders, including ESFRI, IMI, BIC and ERC and specific initiatives in the member states.
The ‘European Open Science Cloud’ is perceived as a sustainable infrastructure for the management and long-term stewardship of research data, with the final aim to accelerate discovery and innovation. Science in Europe should be supported by the infrastructure and it should make existing data infrastructures in different domains more interoperable. The infrastructure should obviously be placed in global context. Also, it will have to support controlled access to data where this is needed for reasons of privacy or data protection.
The Commission High Level Expert Group "European Open Science Cloud" comprises 10 experts in the field of open science, research data sharing and scientific data infrastructures. The other members are: Paul Ayris (Director of Library Services and Leader of the KPA on Communications, Outreach and Open Access, UCL), Jean-Yves Berthou (Innovation Program Director, EDF), Rachel Bruce (Deputy Chief Innovation Officer, Jisc), Stefanie Lindstaedt (Director of Knowledge Technologies Institute, TU GRAZ & Managing Director Know-Center GmbH), Anna Monreale (Assistant Professor, University of Pisa), Yasuhiro Murayama (Director of Integrated Science Data System Research Laboratory of NICT, Science Council of Japan), Caj Södergård (Research Professor in Digital Media Technologies, VTT), Klaus Tochtermann (Director ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics), and Ross Wilkinson (Executive Director Australian National Data Service).