Barend Mons is a global expert on FAIR principles and he led the 5 day long early meeting in January 2014 (Leiden) where the principles were first defined. Originally a molecular biologist with 15 years of basic research experience on malaria parasites and vaccines, he refocused in 2000 on semantic technologies and later on Open Science. He has thus been in this field from the very beginning and started various early movements for open science ‘avant la lettre’ (a.o. Wiki professional, Concept Web Alliance). Mons published over 100 peer reviewed articles and more recently a handbook named: Data Stewardship for Open Science. He was the senior author on the now widely cited FAIR principles paper in Nature’s Scientific Data in 2016. In 2015, Barend was appointed Chair of the High Level Expert Group (HLEG) for the European Open

Science Cloud, and the group published its report, which marked a critical step towards realising the aspiration of the EOSC. After leaving the HLEG he continued to be active towards the practical realisation of the EOSC, defined in the report as the Internet of FAIR data and services. Three countries (The Netherlands,
Germany and France) took the early initiative to create a Global, Open approach to the implementation of
FAIR principles in practice, called GO FAIR, with the aim to kick-start the developments towards EOSC in a global, open science and innovation context. Mons was appointed director for the Dutch International Support and Coordination Office of the infinitive with sister offices in Germany and France.

He is also the elected president of CODATA, the standing committee on research data related issues of the International Science Council. Barend is a member of the Netherlands Academy of Technology and Innovation(ACTI). He is also the European representative in the Board on research Data and Information (BRDI) of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine in the USA.

Presentation:
The Internet for Social Machines
We are in a transition phase of science, where machines (mainly computers) have become our major research assistants. Humans and computers increasingly work together as ‘social machines’ to makes sense of complex natural phenomena. However, computers need a very different input as compared to people and the way we adapt the communication and reuse of our research results is adopting to this new situation only at glacial speed. Still, the 15 FAIR Principles, published in 2016, dealing with machine actionable data and services, have found unusually rapid uptake among a broad spectrum of stakeholders, from research scientists who create and reuse data, to publishers who distribute data, to science funders who track impact of data. Barend will describe the FAIR Principles and show examples of how they have been implemented. He will also present a set of core FAIR Metrics that can help gauge the level of FAIRness of any digital resource. Of particular interest is how additional FAIR Metrics can (and should) be defined to address community-specific data structures and analytic requirements. This discussion, and these examples will be presented in the context of the International GO FAIR Initiative. GO FAIR is a voluntary community of stakeholders devoted to implementation solutions of an emerging Internet of FAIR Data and Services.