An
International Workshop
|
|
[ DRAFT Workshop Proceedings ] |
Workshop Plan and Rationale
by Paul A. David and Paul F. Uhlir
CODATA, along with several other partner organizations, has organized an international workshop at the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris, France on 1-2 September 2005, the purpose of which is to highlight and analyze the variety of experiments that have already been undertaken to enhance the effectiveness of scientific activity in the current transition phase from the print to digital communications media.
The international scope of digital networks and research collaborations make it both necessary and desirable to seek institutional policies and guidelines for action that will contribute to creating the "information commons" for global e-Science. The workshop aims to promote greater understanding of the variety of successful mechanisms that enhance the availability of public information resources for modern scientific research collaborations. It also seeks to facilitate the development of coordinated principles and guidelines for the rational management of publicly-funded data and information in today's rapidly progressing digitally networked research environments.
The Information Commons workshop will build on the body of practical experience and the empirical studies carried out by the participating organizations and other research and information policy institutions. Moreover, collaboration in this initiative by the major international science policy and scientific information policy organizations-CODATA, ICSTI, INASP, ICSU, UNESCO, TWAS, the OECD and the U.S. National Academies -- has provided an unprecedented opportunity to work towards the formulation of a common, international set of principles and guidelines for public access to scientific data and information.
From a scientific perspective, access to data and information has never been as important as it is now. The rapid advances in digital technologies and networks over the past two decades have significantly altered and improved the ways that data and information can be produced, disseminated, managed, and used, both in science and in many other spheres of human endeavor. This progress in the emerging e-infrastructure has enabled scientists to perform quantitatively and qualitatively new functions to: collect and create unprecedented and ever-increasing amounts and types of raw data about all natural objects and phenomena; collapse the space and time in which data and information can be made available; facilitate entirely new forms of distributed research collaboration and information production; and integrate and transform the data resources into unlimited configurations of information, knowledge, and discovery. Perhaps most important in this context is that the internet has reduced the cost and time to produce and disseminate additional copies of information in digital form to near zero.
e-Science has been at the forefront of many new paradigms of digitally networked information creation and dissemination activities. Scientific research communities have led efforts to develop open-source software, public-domain data archives and federated data networks, open access journals, community-based open peer review, collaborative research Web sites, collaboratories for virtual experiments, virtual observatories, and Grid-based computing, among other tools for the conduct of distributed research collaborations. These initiatives have given rise to unprecedented opportunities for accelerating the progress of science and innovation and creating wealth based on the more efficient exploitation of data and information produced through public investments in research. Taken together, they are part of the emerging broader movement in support of both formal and informal peer production and dissemination of information in a globally distributed, volunteer, and open networked environment. Such activities are based on principles that reflect the cooperative ethos that traditionally has imbued much of academic and government (civilian) research agencies; their norms and governance mechanisms may be characterized as those of "public scientific information commons," rather than of a market system based upon proprietary data and information.
With regard to access regimes for public research data, the situation is mixed, with some countries and disciplines providing more open and comprehensive access than others. At the international level, there have been a number of notable efforts to institute open access policies, including the 1991 "Bromley Principles" on the full and open exchange of global change research data, the 1996 Bermuda Principles on the Release of Human Genome Sequence Data, the 1997 ICSU-CODATA Principles for Dissemination of Scientific Data, and the 2004 OECD Ministerial Declaration on access to data from publicly-funded research, among others. The practical effectiveness of these initiatives in altering access conditions, however, has not been systematically evaluated, and the adherence of governments and publicly funded research institutions to such principles remains far from universal.
Public information regimes for scientific data produced in developing countries have remained among the least open. In addition to the economic and organizational limitations on the capabilities of the government apparatus for gathering and distributing such data, and the political restrictions placed upon disclosure of information regarding social and economic conditions, access to scientific data and information has been inhibited by researchers' and research institutions' suspicions that free and open information exchanges, like free trade, will turn out not to be "fair" trade. The marked asymmetries between rich-country and poor-country partners in the division of intellectual property rights from new discoveries and inventions have certainly contributed to undermine the ethos of scientific cooperation in some fields, notably the life sciences.
Open access to the research literature produced from public funding also is a major issue that has received considerable scrutiny in the past few years worldwide. There are now over 1600 scholarly journals provided under open access conditions on the Internet, including some notable initiatives such as the Public Library of Science and BioMed Central. Policy principles on open access to publicly funded journals were issued in both the United States and Europe in 2003 through the "Bethesda Principles" and the "Berlin Declaration." In 2004, many professional society journal publishers produced the "DC Principles," which also recognized the imperative of broad access to the scholarly literature produced from publicly funded research. Commercial journal publishers now are allowing more open access to the articles they publish as well. Most recently, the U.S. House of Representatives and the House of Commons in the United Kingdom proposed legislation that would enhance public access to scientific literature produced from publicly funded research.
Institutional repositories also have been established for pre-prints and e-prints of journal articles (e.g., the Cornell arXiv, originally established for high-energy physics and now expanded to include other areas of physics, mathematics, computer science, and computational biology), for individual research articles and other information resources (e.g., the Social Science Research Network, the MIT D-Space initiative), and for university educational material (e.g., MIT's OpenCourseWare). Public access initiatives in developed countries frequently are being designed with the needs of developing countries expressly considered, while new open access journals are being established within developing countries themselves.
The adoption of many promising new open access initiatives from the bottom up, coupled with the recent introduction of some new top-down legislative proposals, makes it a particularly appropriate time for a comprehensive review and stock-taking as what has been learned. But here too, there is a lack of strategic planning and concerted implementation of policies by the government and academic scientific communities. At the same time, the global trend toward the commoditization of public research outputs -- including both the underlying data and information resources -- is being reinforced by the creation of new legal rights and protectionist mechanisms that are largely extrinsic to the scientific enterprise, but increasingly adopted by participating researchers and their host institutions. The benefits and drawbacks of privatization and commercialization of data and information activities in public-sector science, as well as the application of IP and related restrictions to such activities, need to be more clearly understood and better managed. It undoubtedly is important to identify those respects in which public policies in the developed and developing countries alike reflect legitimate countervailing interests that place limits on openness and cooperation. These include: national security concerns (including grey areas such as "dual use" or "sensitive but unclassified" information), the interests of private-sector parties in the legal protections that have been accorded to their intellectual property rights, and the practice of allowing publicly funded researchers limited periods of exclusive use of their data prior to the publication of their research findings. In public policy guidelines and practical implementations alike, progress is likely to be made through searching for workable solutions to "questions of balance" rather than debating "rights" and "wrongs."
The Information Commons workshop will bring together managers from science agencies, university administrators, researchers, data and information managers and publishers, and science and information policy experts to discuss and develop elements of the strategy. The organizing committee, together with the collaborating organizations, have identified the workshop objectives, established an agenda for the meeting, and identified expert speakers and invitees. The workshop will examine the issues in the context of research in the OECD countries and in the developing world. A draft set of principles and guidelines developed in advance of the workshop will be discussed at the workshop, using successful models as exemplars. Three teams of rapporteurs will synthesize the presentations and discussions in the case study sessions, and their summaries will be offered as the basis for discussion in the Workshop's concluding plenary session. The CODATA website will publish material from the individual presentations, as well as background documents and a post-event report on the proceedings by the Co-Chairs of the Workshop.