BioMed Central Blog : “Hacking the systems” of scholarly communication and personalized medicine – Q&A with Eric Schadt and John Wilbanks

"Open access to scientific data is a means to achieve the healthcare singularity’s end – of more efficient, reliable and reproducible research which will ultimately improve human health. Dr Eric Schadt (Mount Sinai School of Medicine and Editor-in-Chief of BioMed Central journal Open Network Biology) and John Wilbanks (Senior Fellow at the Kauffman Foundation, Research Fellow at Lybba and Open Network Biology Editorial Board member) are two scientists working to transform research on human disease. A major barrier to effective sharing of genetic and clinical data are suboptimal processes for obtaining informed consent from patients, and intellectual property restrictions placed on individual patient data obtained through research. One of the outcomes of Workgroup D at this spring’s Sage Commons Congress, attended by BioMed Central, was to develop a suite of legal tools to empower research participant control over the use and access to their samples and data. John Wilbanks – who recently left his full-time post as Vice President for Science at Creative Commons to focus on data sharing – is taking on this challenge with his latest project, Consent to Research, which celebrates its alpha release today...."