Koïchiro Matsuura, the Director-General of UNESCO, spoke at the recent Paris conference on Open Access. He has now put a summary of his UNESCO remarks online. Excerpt: "The new economic and technological environment is raising concerns about the erosion of access to certain information and knowledge whose free sharing facilitated scientific research and education in past decades....It is in this spirit that UNESCO has prepared a Draft Recommendation concerning the Promotion and Use of Multilingualism and Universal Access to Cyberspace which will be submitted for adoption to UNESCO’s General Conference at its next session in the autumn 2003. It will then be presented to the first World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Geneva at the end of this year." The two chief points in the draft recommendation are (1) the "development of public domain content" and (2) "the equitable balance between the interests of rights-holders and the public interest". (Thanks to Milad Doueihi.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/01/2003 10:14:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
