This is the twelfth in the series of short statements from candidates in the coming CODATA Elections at the General Assembly to be held on 27-28 October, 2023.  Marc Nyssen  is a candidate for the CODATA Executive Committee as an Ordinary Member. He was nominated by the International Union for Physical and Engineering Sciences in Medicine.

Marc Nyssen has been active in the fields of medical informatics and biomedical engineering, as a researcher, as a developer, as a professor and as a volunteer. Pioneering in the medical internet applications, advocating Open Data and the adherence to the FAIR principles. He designed and developed several ICT systems in health care, among which the nation-wide electronic prescription system, fully deployed in Belgium. On the international level, he is devoted to the propagation of knowledge and experience world-wide via the IFMBE federation and the IUPESM union, also as promoter of several academic projects and education programs in Africa (RDC, Rwanda, Burundi, Niger) and in Cuba. Also since 10 years a member of the Flemish Data Privacy Authority.

The importance of sharing high quality data among scientists cannot be underestimated, therefore the data committees such as CODATA, especially in the ISC context are instrumental to improve data sharing, primarily in the scientific community but with impact on the whole world.

In my field “medical informatics”, I see two major challenges regarding data that could be addressed:

• the appropriate sharing of medical data, while protecting the privacy of the individual
• the rewarding of scientists who share quality and well documented data, resulting from their research.

To illustrate the importance of the first of these challenges just think of the way tests of new medication are performed: it would not be possible to include millions of patients; therefore potential rare side-effects cannot be detected; well controlled follow-up via appropriately encoded medical records would potentially save lives and hardship when carried out, perhaps over many years. But with respect of the privacy of the participants and their right to retract their data.

In this field, collaboration with the WHO would be a very interesting factor, possibly leading to a breakthrough.                                                                                                        

Scientists currently are judged mainly by the impact factors of their publications. Would it not be good to include an impact factor, related to the well documented quality data they provide to the scientific community?

I will gladly contribute to these and other matters regarding FAIR and Open data.