Susanna-Assunta Sansone is a Team Leader at the University of Oxford e-Research Centre, UK. There her work is focused on standards and software development to facilitate the data annotation, sharing and meta-analysis of biological, biomedical and environmental studies. She is the co-founder of MIBBI and the BioSharing initiatives.

Professor Stuart Shieber directs the Office for Scholarly Communication at Harvard University. He is also a professor of computer science in Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. As a strong open-access advocate, he has led a multi-year effort to shape Harvard’s policies in this arena.

We will continue to suffer from the simple inability to communicate our data if we do not both find means by which we can make legacy data accessible and move communities toward representations that are accessible to others.

Scientists should not expect government to solve our problems. We need to get our act together on our own. It’s our job, it’s our mission, it’s our chosen task. Our goal is to create, distribute, and preserve knowledge, and sharing data enhances all three.

Bio: Jeannette M. Wing is a computer science professor and department head at Carnegie Mellon University. She also is former assistant director for computer and information science and engineering at the NSF. She earned her Ph.D. in computer science at MIT. She serves on nine journal editorial boards, including the Journal of the ACM and the Communications of the ACM. [...]

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.

Barbour has been the chief editor of PLoS Medicine – a journal of the Public Library of Science – since 2008. She came to PLoS in 2004 from a career in publishing at The Lancet where she had worked for about five years before joining PLoS.