Rees is a principal scientist at Science Commons’ Neurocommons Project. A computer scientist, he worked in Millennium Pharmaceuticals’ computational biology group before joining Science Commons. At the company his work focused on large-scale curated protein interaction networks.

Wilbanks is the executive director of the Science Commons project at Creative Commons. Before taking on this role, he founded a bioinformatics company that developed semantic graph networks that could be used in the research and development of pharmacological products. Earlier Wilbanks worked at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.

Cornell’s e-print arXiv of scientific papers will evolve from a simple database to a place where “authors, articles, databases and readers talk to each other.”

Gibbons is Vice Provost and Dean of the River Campus Libraries at the Univ. of Rochester in Rochester, New York. In 2007 The Chronicle of Higher Education praised Gibbons for her pioneering work in the field of library administration.

Research cannot flourish if data are not preserved and made accessible. All concerned must act accordingly. More and more often these days, a research project’s success is measured not just by the publications it produces, but also by the data it makes available to the wider community.

Andrew Vickers is an associate attending research methodologist at Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. Through his published studies, commentary and leadership role in his own research field, he has become known worldwide as one of the foremost advocates of scientific data sharing.