Björn Brembs
Björn is a neurobiologist who started studying biology in 1991 and has been collecting digital data and writing code to evaluate these data and control his experiments since 1994. During these early days, he witnessed how universities were experimenting with the new internet technology: email, Gopher, NCSA Mosaic, MBONE and many more. Institutions were pulling cables, installing routers as well as other hard- and software, merely in the hope that this investment in new technology may improve their research and teaching mission. He was surprised to look back later and realize that scholarly institutions since then have largely abandoned such innovation, resulting in little progress in scholarly digital infrastructure since the mid-1990s. He has been active in advocating digital infrastructure modernization since about 2007 and is still today waiting for institutions to provide services for research data and code, the way they are providing non-digital services such as water, electricity or furniture.
