For example, the dueling proposals recently introduced in the U.S. Congress could have reverberations worldwide: The Federal Research Public Access Act would require articles resulting from research funded by any federal agency to be made publicly available 6 months after publication, whereas the Research Works Act would prohibit such mandates.

Read the Full Text

The draft was prepared by the UN Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC), in its capacity as the Secretariat of the Friends of the Conservation Commons. It was prepared as an input to planning for the future of the Conservation Commons, and as a contribution to the CBD and the future Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). The draft incorporates input from a wide range of expertise across the sector, including from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF).

The document analyzes the major barriers to sharing data, information and knowledge related to the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity, along with an overview of initiatives already addressing these barriers. On the basis of this analysis, the gaps in current activity and areas requiring additional support are identified in a series of recommendations for future actions. [CBD Notification] [Publication: Review Draft: A Review of Barriers to the Sharing of Biodiversity Data and Information, with Recommendations for Eliminating Them]

A summary of the report can be found here: http://conserveonline.org/workspaces/fnr/documents/promoting-synergies-within-biodiversity-related

Free and unrestricted access to research results and publications, known as open access (OA), is key to speeding up scientific discovery. There is also growing evidence that OA maximises the impact of research through better dissemination and uptake of research findings.

But how can we make this a truly global and sustainable endeavour? This was much discussed at the recent Berlin 9 Open Access conference in Washington DC.

Unlock local research potential with open access

Leslie Chan

8 December 2011 | EN | 中文

The traditional journal publishing
system is not serving the needs
of developing countries

Flickr/moonlightbulb

The developing world is not well served by traditional research publishing, but can break new ground with open access, argues Leslie Chan.

Free and unrestricted access to research results and publications, known as open access (OA), is key to speeding up scientific discovery. There is also growing evidence that OA maximises the impact of research through better dissemination and uptake of research findings.

But how can we make this a truly global and sustainable endeavour? This was much discussed at the recent Berlin 9 Open Access conference in Washington DC.

There was a recurrent theme: that in today’s highly networked, open-knowledge environment, the traditional scholarly communication system — with the journal article as the key currency — can no longer serve the diverse needs of scholarship and discovery.

Conventional methods of evaluating research impact based on journal citations, particularly the reliance on Thomson Reuters’ journal impact factor, need to be reconsidered and redesigned to reflect new scholarly practices and the diverse means of engagement enabled by OA and the new wave of web tools (‘Web 2.0′).

OA offers an opportunity to rethink what constitutes research impact, how to reward scholarship and how to encourage research sharing — issues of particular importance for the developing world.

Emphasis on international appeal

For too long, research assessment in the developing world has closely followed practices and metrics created by wealthier nations. Even organisations such as UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) and OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) continue to reinforce the use of the journal impact factor and the registration of patents as metrics for national research performance.

As the impact factor is heavily biased towards journals from the developed world, researchers from poorer countries have been encouraged to publish in indexed international journals rather than national or local journals as a way to gain institutional and national recognition.

This has done much to shift the emphasis of research to topics that appeal to an international readership, obscuring local research agendas.

There is also a growing emphasis on university rankings as a proxy for excellence, based primarily on research productivity — prominent examples are Times Higher Education’s World University Rankings and the Academic Ranking of World Universities. This means that the impact factor continues to dominate research evaluation despite widespread criticism of biased coverage and a flawed methodology underlying its calculation.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in China, where researchers and institutions are given cash incentives to publish in high-ranking international journals. This is seen as essential for boosting China’s presence in world science.

So while the total scientific publication output from China, as measured by Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science, is now only second to the United States [1], the focus on external recognition undermines locally important research and creates disincentives for the government to focus on locally relevant policy and funding.

Openness can unlock potential

This should not be the model for the developing world to emulate. Instead,policymakers should encourage experimentation with practices that take advantage of the potential of openness — in research, data, source code, educational resources and innovation.

Open repositories for publications and data, new tools for knowledge discovery and new forms of representation and visualisation can bring exciting opportunities for innovations in scholarly communication. Examples are the Open Source Drug Discovery Network and the Virtual Open Access Agriculture and Aquaculture Repository.

We are seeing the emergence of what innovation-policy scholar Caroline Wagner calls the ‘new invisible college’ [2], where researchers collaborate across disciplinary and national boundaries, driven by common interests rather than by international funding agendas.

This is a good time for research institutions with nascent capacity to overtake those in well-off nations by adopting better mechanisms for the exchange of knowledge. And they may be better placed to adapt and innovate as they are not bound by tradition.

Signs to the open road

Policymakers and researchers must begin to take advantage of these capabilities. This means thinking beyond the confines of the impact factor and towards new forms of scholarly metrics enabled by social media andnetworking tools.

An encouraging development, announced at the Berlin 9 meeting, is the World Bank’s plan to provide open access to research it funds under a licence similar to that of Creative Commons — a clear sign that the organisation is beginning to see the links between openness and innovation.

Recently, UNESCO launched the Global Open Access Portal to mobilise and coordinate OA initiatives across its member states. This late arrival on the OA scene could duplicate existing efforts, but UNESCO’s action is significant and should spur other UN bodies into serious engagement with OA.

And next year’s Berlin 10 Open Access meeting will be hosted by the Stellenbosch University in South Africa, making its first appearance in a developing country. It will be a good time and place to take stock of progress on re-evaluating the default measure of research quality.

Just as the rapid growth of mobile devices in many parts of Africa has spurred innovations in social entrepreneurship, mobile health applications and educational opportunities, so too could networked science based on OA be a source of innovation and local problem-solving in the developing world.

Leslie Chan is director of Bioline International, a non-profit electronic publishing collaboration, and supervisor for the International Development Studies programme at the University of Toronto.

REFERENCES

[1] Royal Society Knowledge, networks and nations: global scientific collaboration in the 21st century (2011)

[2] Wagner, Caroline. The new invisible college: science for development. Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press (2008)

source: http://www.scidev.net/en/science-communication/open-access/opinions/unlock-local-research-potential-with-open-access–1.html

Geospatial information can empower decision-making on "extremely important" concerns in developing countries, such as development andenvironmental conservation, said Susan Wolfinbarger, from the Geospatial Technologies and Human Rights Project at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Global geospatial group to promote equitable data access

Gozde Zorlu

18 August 2011 | EN

A high-level global group promoting geospatial information could help developing countries gainbetter access to data to help tackle issues such as climate change, conservation and disastermanagement.

The UN has set up an expert committee and a programme on global geospatial information management under its Economic and Social Council to encourage international cooperation and establish best practice on the use of geographic data, collected by technologies such as remote sensing and the global positioning system (GPS).

The decision, announced last month (27 July), was triggered by a report earlier this year by the UN secretary-general that concluded that many developing countries have a "serious lack of institutional capacity to harness the enormous potential of geospatial information technologies and to build a sustainable national infrastructure".

There have been several efforts to manage such information, including the Permanent Committee for Geospatial Data Infrastructure of the Americas (PC-IDEA) and the Permanent Committee on GIS Infrastructure for Asia and the Pacific (PCGIAP).

"But these discussions have been regional in focus," said Paul Cheung, director of the new initiative and head of the UN’s statistics division in New York.

"There is a need for a global platform, for all countries to come together and focus on all of the issues. That is why we have created this committee," he told SciDev.Net.

A key task will be to standardise geospatial information and applications to enable the sharing of data and services across borders.

According to Cheung, geospatial data is increasingly owned by multinational corporations, which sell software and platforms to developing countries that may not have the capacity to know what the best products are or how best to use them. The new committee could help represent developing countries and advise them on building up their national institutions.

"Spatial information and analysis lie at the heart of nearly all major international peace, global health and economic development problems," Mark Becker, a geospatial applications expert at the Earth Institute at Columbia University, United States, told SciDev.Net.

"Having a central committee focused on setting standards for accuracy of data and guidelines for the fair redistribution of data is essential," he said.

Becker added that the new committee could increase the efficient use of spatial information in projects for developing countries, such as managing refugee centres and immunisation programmes.

"If you can easily discover and download data that is critical for your operations and not have to create it yourself you have increased your efficiency," he said.

Geospatial information can empower decision-making on "extremely important" concerns in developing countries, such as development andenvironmental conservation, said Susan Wolfinbarger, from the Geospatial Technologies and Human Rights Project at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

"Given the rapid development of technologies such as remote sensing, mapping and GPS, a group of experts on geographic technology is essential to help develop standards for data quality, cooperation and use of geospatial information," Wolfinbarger added.

The first UN high-level forum on geospatial information management is scheduled to take place in Seoul, Korea, in October to bring together countries, international organisations and the private sector.

"But at the end of the day, it is governments that will have to decide on issues," said Cheung.

Link to UN secretary-general’s ‘Global geospatial information management’ report [217kB]

source: http://www.scidev.net/en/science-communication/open-access/news/global-geospatial-group-to-promote-equitable-data-access.html

InforMEA was launched during the Second Steering Committee Meeting of the MEA Information and Knowledge Management Initiative, which is supported by UNEP. The meeting is bringing together approximately 25 representatives from MEAs, UN agencies and observers in Glion, Switzerland, from 14-16 June 2011, where participants also will  brainstorm possibilities for collaboration related to online reporting, an MEA college, and extensions of the InforMEA (UN Information Portal on MEAs) interoperability project.

In a keynote speech at the launch, John Scanlon, Secretary General of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), noted that InforMEA provides a useful and tangible project that seeks to deliver information that parties want. He emphasized the need to give coherent expression to the entire body of international environmental law and to show how MEAs are relevant to sustainable development in the lead-up to the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD, or Rio+20). Scanlon said this portal will contribute to these efforts.

Maria Louisa Silva, Executive Secretary of the Barcelona Convention (Mediterranean Action Plan), also offered a keynote speech. She highlighted the importance of innovation and the development of linkages among conventions, and noted that these activities require information exchange.

To announce the launch, UNEP and the MEAs prepared joint press releases. [IISD RS Sources] [InforMEA Webportal] [UNEP Press Release] [Ramsar Convention Press Release] [CMS Press Release]

source: http://uncsd.iisd.org/news/unep-meas-launch-informea-webportal/

As of June 2, 2011, all PDF versions of books published by the National Academies Press (NAP) will be downloadable free of charge to anyone. This includes current catalog of more than 4,000 books plus future reports published by NAP.*

Free access to online content supports the mission of NAP—publisher for the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, and National Research Council–to improve government decision making and public policy, increase public education and understanding, and promote the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge in matters involving science, engineering, technology, and health.

In 1994, NAP began offering free content online. Before today’s

announcement, all PDFs were free to download in developing countries,

and 65 percent of them were available for free to any user.

Like no other organization, the National Academies can enlist the

nation’s foremost scientists, engineers, health professionals, and other

experts to address the scientific and technical aspects of society’s

most pressing problems through the authoritative and independent reports

published by NAP.

Please feel free to share FREE ACCESS to ITC’s Market Analysis Tools with your colleagues or partners in developing countries by forwarding this email message.

ITC’s Market Analysis Tools offer the possibility of visualizing data with tables graphs and maps. Here is a brief summary:

§ Trade Map: an international trade statistics database covering over 5300 products of the Harmonized System, and up to 15,000 products at national tariff line level for over 220 countries and territories. The yearly data for 2009, both direct and mirror data, are available for more than 200 countries or territories. 70 countries have reported their 2010 Q4, representing almost two thirds of world trade. Monthly data is as current as March 2011 for some countries. Trade Map presents indicators on export performance, international demand, alternative markets and the role of competitors from both the product and country perspectives.

§ Market Access Map: a database providing tariff information (customs duties) for 184 countries, incorporating regional and bilateral preferences arising out of bilateral and regional trade agreements. It also allows users to analyse the protection of any geographic grouping and sectoral aggregation. In addition it offers the possibility of simulating tariff reductions using various negotiation formulae.

New! In the second half of 2011, Market Access Map will be replaced by a new integrated application offering comprehensive solutions for analysing market access measures worldwide, including tariffs, non-tariff measures (compulsory regulations) and trade data.

.       Investment Map: tracks global trends through a statistical database detailed by sector and by country (ISIC nomenclature). It is the only web-based platform to provide such detailed information on FDI flows and stock combined with trade and tariff data, as well as with information on more than 130,000 foreign affiliates located in developing countries. Investment Map country coverage increased significantly in 2010, showing detailed FDI data on about 100 economies.

§ Standards Map: a recently launched web-based tool that centralizes and disseminates information on private (or voluntary) standards and related research material to strengthen the capacity of producers, exporters and buyers to participate in sustainable production and trade.

To make the most effective use of our powerful tools, we also offer a complete self-guided training facility with video tutorials, downloadable presentations, practical exercise and user guides to help our users master the important features of the tools such as performance indicators, bubble graphs and maps: www.intracen.org/marketanalysis/DistanceLearning.aspx

Should you require any additional information, please contact: marketanalysis@intracen.org

Wiley Open Access will provide authors wishing to publish their research outcomes in an open access journal with a range of new high quality publications which meet the requirements of funding organizations and institutions where these apply.

“The development of Wiley Open Access is an example of our commitment to offer authors the widest possible choice in publishing with Wiley”, said Steve Miron, Senior Vice President, Wiley-Blackwell.  He added, “Wiley has a strong history of innovation in journal publishing and we see this as a natural extension of our service to our learned society partners, authors, and the scholarly community in its broadest sense”.

The new journals are being launched in collaboration with a group of international professional and scholarly societies with which Wiley currently partners.  Each journal will appoint an Editor-in-Chief and Editorial Board responsible for ensuring that all articles are rigorously peer-reviewed, and each journal will be offered with the full functionality of Wiley Online Library.

The new Wiley Open Access journal Brain and Behavior will publish open access research across neurology, neuroscience, psychiatry and psychology.  Brain and Behavior’s newly appointed Editor-in-Chief, Andrei V. Alexandrov, Professor of Neurology, University of Alabama at Birmingham, comments:

“With the launch of Brain and Behavior, the Editorial Board and I, along with the support of many international societies, will offer the research community a high quality peer-reviewed journal that meets the needs of those authors who wish to publish their work in an open access environment. I am delighted to be working with Wiley to deliver this important new service.”

Professor Allen Moore, University of Exeter and newly appointed Editor-in-Chief of Ecology and Evolution comments:

“I am excited to be involved with this new open access journals initiative.  Ecology and Evolution will deliver rapid decisions and fast publication of research in all areas of ecology, evolution and conservation science.  By working in collaboration with leading societies to deliver open access to all, this new journal offers authors an ideal place to publish their work quickly to the broadest possible audience.”

Professor Geoff Hanlon, Honorary President of Society for Applied Microbiology (SfAM) comments:

“The new Wiley Open Access journal in microbiology will deliver something of real value, with in-depth peer-review, fast publishing times and availability to the worldwide research community.  We are looking forward to partnering with Wiley to support this new high-quality open access journal for the microbiology community.”

Wiley Open Access journals will be published under the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.  A publication fee will be payable by authors on acceptance of their articles.  Wiley will introduce a range of new payment schemes to enable academic and research institutions, funders, societies, and corporations to actively support their researchers and members who wish to publish in Wiley Open Access journals.

More information is available at www.wileyopenaccess.com

Lessig At CERN: Scientific Knowledge Should Not Be Reserved For Academic Elite

By Catherine Saez on 19 April 2011 @ 3:26 pm

Free culture leader and Harvard University law professor Larry Lessig was at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) yesterday to talk about access to scientific knowledge on the internet. In the symbolic place where the World Wide Web was invented and where scientists are now trying to unravel the creation of the universe, Lessig praised CERN’s open access initiative and in this temple of reasoning, said the copyright architecture was on the edge of absurdity.

[Update: the video of Lessig's speech is now available here ^[1].]

Although the major focus of copyright has been on entertainment, science is a field where internet access is unnecessarily restricted to privileged scholars, he said. The copyright architecture is obsolete and needs to protect copyright as an essential tool for creation, but recognise that sharing is at the core of the architecture of the internet.

The fight over the scope of copyright has been almost exclusively centred on artists’ rights, in particular in music, he said, and although everybody agrees that copyright is essential for certain creative work, a “sensible” copyright policy should be developed to protect and encourage that creative work.

“We’ve been fighting a battle in the context of copyright where copyright is essential,” and spending too little attention in a context where copyright is not essential, such as the context of science, he said.

Most scientific resources are protected on the internet, Lessig said. It can only be accessed by professors and students in a university setting. If “you are a member of the knowledge elite,” he said, then there is free access, but “for the rest of the world, not so much.”

The open access movement was inspired by the dramatic increase in prices for journals, he said. The market power of publishers had been exploding because the purchasers had no other choice than to buy those journals, he said.

Publisher restrictions do not achieve the objective of enlightenment, but rather the reality of “elite-nment,” he said.

YouTube Needs Clearer Legal Terms

Lessig said that YouTube occupies a prominent place in knowledge access. “We should not minimise” the significance of YouTube in the infrastructure of culture right now, Lessig said. YouTube has 43 different languages and there is more uploading in one month than was broadcasted by major networks in the United States over the last 60 years, he said. The world has gone from a read-only culture to a read-write culture, he said.

The system as it is, is not working, he said, as it lacks transparency and basic information so that people know where they stand. A sensible system should clearly state that it is plainly legal to make a remix, a non-commercial creation in which a user builds on something that already exists, even if it is not legal for YouTube to distribute it without paying some royalties to the copyright owner whose work has been remixed, he said.

Reforms are needed, he said. In November, Lessig was invited to talk at the World Intellectual Property Organization (IPW, WIPO, 5 November 2010 ^[2]), where he proposed the creation of a “blue sky commission” that would work on copyright in the digital age, as the architecture of the 21st century does not make sense in this age, he said.

The five elements of the copyright architecture that would make sense in the digital age should be the following, according to Lessig:

1) Copyright has to be simple. If it purports to regulate 15-year-olds, they have to be able to understand it. “They don’t understand it now” – nobody does, he said.
2) Copyright needs to be efficient. It is a property system, he said, but “happens to be the most inefficient property system known to man,” he said. “We can’t know who owns what under our system,” and there is a need to restore some kind of formality, such as a system to record ownership.
3) Copyright needs to be better targeted and should regulate selectively. For example, between copies and remix, between professional and amateurs. Copyright needs to efficiently regulate copies of professional work, but amateur remix need to be free of the regulation of copyright, not “even triggering a copyright concern.” Lessig proposed to deregulate a significant space of culture and focusing the regulation of copyright where “it can do some good.”
4) Copyright needs to be effective and provide revenue for artists, which is not the case today, Lessig said.
5) Copyright needs to be realistic. A war has been fought against peer to peer file sharing, where the so-called pirates are “our children,” he said, and that war “has been a total failure,” not achieving its objective of reducing illegal file sharing. Alternative solutions need to be used, such as compulsory licences, or voluntary collective licences.

Had one of those alternatives been applied 10 years ago, artists would have more money because fighting the copyright war came with high legal costs, businesses would have had more competition, and “we would not have a generation of criminals who have grown up being called criminals because they are technically pirates” under the current copyright legislation.

Academia’s Ethical Obligation

In the context of academia, there is a need to recognise its ethical obligation of universal access to knowledge, “not American university access to knowledge, but universal access to knowledge in every part of the globe.” Academia should not practice exclusivity, Lessig said, and leadership in open access should be exercised by those who can “afford to take the lead,” such as senior academics, “those with tenure,” people who can help redefine what open access is, and support, respect and encourage it.

Praise for CERN’s Open Access Work

CERN “gave us” the World Wide Web, he said, and CERN has taken the lead supporting open access in a crucial space of physics. This work will have a dramatic effect on changing the debate in science. It remains to find a way to leverage this leadership into leadership for the globe, he said.

CERN launched an open access initiative, to facilitate open access publishing in high-energy physics (IPW, Access to Knowledge, 5 January 2009 ^[3]). The Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3) is a consortium of high-energy physics funding agencies, high-energy physics laboratories, and leading national and international libraries and library consortia, according to its website ^[4].

Related Articles:

• Lessig Calls For WIPO To Lead Overhaul Of Copyright System ^[5]
• Global Copyright Reform: A View From The South In Response To Lessig ^[6]
• Experts Meet To Weigh Health And Environment Scientific Innovations ^[7]

Categories: Access to Knowledge,Copyright Policy,Education/ R&D/ Innovation,English,European Policy,Human Rights,IP Policies,Information and Communications Technology/ Broadcasting,Language,News,Technical Cooperation/ Technology Transfer,Themes,Venues

Article printed from Intellectual Property Watch: http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog

URL to article: http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/2011/04/19/lessig-at-cern-scientific-knowledge-should-not-be-reserved-for-academic-elite/

URLs in this post:

[1] now available here: http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1345337

[2] IPW, WIPO, 5 November 2010: http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/2010/11/05/lessig-calls-for-wipo-to-lead-overhaul-of-copyright-system/

[3] IPW, Access to Knowledge, 5 January 2009: http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/2009/01/05/project-underway-to-convert-high-energy-physics-literature-to-open-access/

[4] its website: http://scoap3.org/

[5] Lessig Calls For WIPO To Lead Overhaul Of Copyright System: http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/2010/11/05/lessig-calls-for-wipo-to-lead-overhaul-of-copyright-system/

[6] Global Copyright Reform: A View From The South In Response To Lessig: http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/2010/11/12/global-copyright-reform-a-view-from-the-south-in-response-to-lessig/

[7] Experts Meet To Weigh Health And Environment Scientific Innovations: http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/2011/03/28/experts-meet-to-weigh-health-and-environment-scientific-innovations/

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