Riding the Wave to the European Parliament

"The meeting, a workshop on Scientific Data Infrastructures, involved MEPs, led by Teresa Riera Madurell and also Luis Martin-Oar who leads on science policy in the European Parliament, the Scientific Technology Options Assessment secretariat, members of the High Level Expert Group (HLEG) and representatives from a number of projects, including ODE. Zoran Stančič, the deputy Director General of INFSO, and Kostas Glinos, head of the unit which funds e-Infrastructure, were also there to help bind the Commission and Parliament views. Prof John Sulston winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine gave the keynote speech. He spoke with an understated passion about the importance of open access, powerfully illustrating this with the results of the decision to make genomic information open to all. Leading neatly on from this came ODE; I may be biased but my colleague Salvatore Mele’s presentation of the ODE report (Ten Tales of Drivers and Barriers in Data Sharing) was exceptionally good. He bound the tales together into a coherent whole where each of the tales illustrated an important point while leading on to the next, in the manner a master story-teller writes a book which one cannot put down...."