Barend Mons is a molecular biologist and biosemantics specialist.
Education
Mons was awarded a Masters (1981 Cum Laude) and a Doctor of Philosophy (1986) from on Plasmodium berghei, and has worked for more than ten years on the genetic differentiation of malaria parasites, publishing over 45 research articles After switching to biosemantics he published over 60 papers on this area.
Career
He is known for innovations in scholarly collaboration, especially nanopublications and the FAIR data initiative. Since 2012 he is a Professor in Biology-Semantics at the Department of Human Genetics at the Leiden University Medical Centre and he is also affiliated with the Erasmus Medical Centre, University of Rotterdam, both in The Netherlands. In 2015 Mons was appointed chair of the High Level Expert Group on the European Open Science Cloud.
In 1996 Mons joined the European Commission as a Seconded National Expert with the task to develop and support international scientific networks, especially with developing countries as partners.
During this time, Mons supported several other international initiatives. He pioneered one of the first electronic interactive communication systems for science networking with developing countries, SHARED, for which he started to (co-)design thesaurus-based concept extraction technologies in order to match across languages and jargon, with the Erasmus University of Rotterdam.
From 1999 to 2004 he served the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (The National Research Council, New World Order) as a senior adviser on International Health Research. In addition to his teaching responsibilities, Mons has remained involved in international scientific management and networking at various levels.
He was one of the founding trustees of the Centre for the Management of Intellectual Property in Health Research and Development, which assists people in developing countries to manage their critical intellectual property for the betterment of Society.
He co-founded Collexis B.V. in 2000 and he also co-founded Knewco, Incorporated. in 2006. His present activities mainly focus on international networking to realise a completely new form of Computer Assisted Distributed Annotation and on-line knowledge discovery, in close collaboration between the Leiden University Medical Centre and The Dutch Techcenter for the Life Sciences, and largely based on the Knowlet technology combined with Open Access and WikiProfessional approaches. encouraging the use of microattributions. Since 2014 he acts as Head of Node of the Dutch Node in ELIXIR. Also in 2014 he initiated the FAIR Data initiative.
Membership
He is a member of the Executive Committee for the Innovative Medicines Initiative project known as Open PHACTS.