Digital Rights Network

Source: scidev.net

A leading international scientific organisation has launched a global initiative to develop ways of increasing access to knowledge produced by publicly funded research.

The Global Information Commons for Science Initiative seeks to remove restrictions to accessing information that technological advances and new ways of protecting intellectual property have created.

The International Council for Science's (ICSU) Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA) launched the initiative on 14 November in Tunis, Tunisia.

"The broad goal is to devise and implement new policy guidelines and legal structures that will promote collaboration in a variety of research domains", says Paul David, an economist at Stanford University, United States, and visiting faculty member at the Oxford Internet Institute in Oxford, United Kingdom.

The CODATA initiative aims to foster "a productive balance between private research and development, and publicly funded open science," he says.

Addressing a conference at UNESCO's Paris headquarters in September, David said CODATA wants to show that rights over intellectual property can be protected and used whilst, at the same time, maximising the social benefits from public investments in research.

According to CODATA, their approach seeks a "collaborative, consensual solution" to the conflict between the advantages of protecting commercial scientific data, and the economic and social costs such protection imposes on scientific enterprise.

It has three specific goals. Firstly, to make people more aware of the benefits that easy access and use of scientific information will bring to society.

Second, to promote the wide adoption of effective ways of increasing the availability and use of publicly funded research findings.

And finally, to encourage and coordinate members of the global scientific community who are already trying to achieve the first two objectives, "particularly in developing countries".