Open Access News

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 [Creating the Information Commons for e-Science, Paris, September 1-2, 2005] aims to promote greater understanding of the variety of successful mechanisms that enhance the availability of public information resources for modern scientific research collaborations....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....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....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....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.