Section III

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17 September DRAFT PAD&PFU

Creating Global Information Commons for Science

An International Initiative of the Committee on Data for Science and Technology

A. Summary of Activities under the Initiative
The Global Information Commons for Science Initiative will concentrate on research and analysis, promotion of successful policies and practices, and coordination of activities among the participating organizations and stakeholders, with particular emphasis on "common use" licensing approaches. Because the primary purview of CODATA is scientific and technical data, the initial focus will be on interdisciplinary and international data resources, primarily in the public sector. The addition of information resources for developing integrated information commons will be accomplished over time through its collaboration with other organizations, as discussed below. The Initiative will serve as an interface between the national and international organizations that guide, manage, and fund public research activities from the top-down, on the one hand, with the organizations that have been developing innovative legal and institutional mechanisms for improving the social and economic benefits of such research, on the other. Toward these ends, the Initiative will promote the four principal goals described below, together with a spectrum of related activities.

1. Improve understanding and increase awareness of the societal and economic benefits of easy access to and reuse of scientific data and information online, particularly those resulting from publicly funded research activities.

The research and analysis activities under the Initiative will be focused on several broad areas of inquiry that are necessary to better understand and promote easy access to and use of publicly-funded digital data and information, as noted below. Primary attention will be given to improving the understanding of institutional models that can provide open availability online on an economically sustainable basis and on the legal mechanisms and contractual templates that can be adopted and used more broadly. Substantial effort will be devoted to explaining the meaning and importance of the concepts associated with this Initiative. Some of these, like the common-use licenses, are relatively new and complex, while others, such as the boundaries between "public" and "private" are difficult to define precisely and shift over time and place. The factors involved in developing information "commons" in different scientific contexts, and the related benefits and costs will be examined in detail as well, using a combination of quantitative and qualitative assessment methodologies. The following areas have been identified at the outset:


 * Institutional and management aspects (e.g., development and implementation of different commons models, best practices, public/private interfaces, processes for knowledge transfer and diffusion);


 * Legal and policy aspects (e.g., international agreements, enabling statutes and regulations, permissive licensing approaches, intellectual property and information policies at the inter-governmental, inter-institutional, and scientific peer-to-peer levels);


 * Economic considerations (e.g., strategies for long-term sustainability of commons models, cost/benefit analyses);


 * Technical infrastructure requirements related to providing open availability (e.g., technical and semantic interoperability, legal metadata standards); and


 * Development issues (e.g., analysis of the different conditions of access to and use of scientific data and information by developing countries, capacity building goals and requirements, and related cultural and sociological considerations).

It should be understood that that not all of this research will be able to be performed directly or concurrently within the Initiative. Subject to the availability of funds and the interest of sponsors, the managers of the Initiative will commission selected experts to produce white papers, convene workshops and symposia with policy analysts and practitioners, and in particular leverage the resources of the partner organizations and other stakeholder groups to conduct a coordinated suite of studies, based upon an agreed research agenda. The results of these and other related studies will be made available through the Initiative's "open access knowledge environment."

2. Identify and promote the wide adoption of successful institutional and legal models for providing open availability on a sustainable basis and facilitating reuse of publicly-funded scientific data and information.

Another major objective of the Initiative will be a comprehensive cataloguing and characterization of different institutional and legal models of data and information access, with a view to facilitating the broad promotion of successful examples of such activities in analogous discipline and institutional contexts within the scientific community. It is important to emphasize that openness can be achieved in many ways, and with different costs and benefits, as will be described and analyzed under objective #1 above. The Initiative's open access knowledge environment will serve as a clearinghouse for these many examples, either linking to other such compilations of information that already exist (e.g., the Lund University registry of open access journals or the Southampton University registry of open access institutional repositories) or developing new ones (e.g., a registry of open access data centers and networks).

3. Encourage and help to coordinate the efforts of the many stakeholders in the world's diverse scientific community who are engaged in devising and implementing effective approaches to attaining these objectives, with particular attention to the circumstances of the developing as well as the developed countries.

The managers of the Initiative will work closely with the affiliated organizations and their large constituencies in the global public research community to establish effective channels of communication with them, and to help coordinate their efforts in pursuing common(s) objectives. There are already many research programs and institutions working in this area, as indicated in Box 1 above. The Initiative will avoid duplication of effort with its collaborating organizations, as well as with the many other groups working on these issues. The primary stakeholders in this Initiative include all researchers worldwide and those associated with the public research system, including governmental science policy and funding agencies, governmental research organizations, universities and not-for-profit research institutes, science and engineering academies, learned and professional societies, publishers and other information disseminators, research libraries and archives, data centers, and individual researchers and information specialists. The international scientific organizations initially collaborating on this Initiative are broadly representative of many of the primary stakeholder constituencies, as outlined below, while many others will be added over time to improve coordination and communication. The Initiative will work directly with the various stakeholder groups in pursuit of its objectives, as well as indirectly, by leveraging the resources of the partner and affiliated organizations.

4. The Open Access Knowledge Environment

An online open access knowledge environment will be developed to provide vigorous support for the Initiative's objectives. This knowledge environment will use established and emerging open Web and grid services and applications with enhanced functionalities, allowing users to move among and easily integrate different information resources in pursuing the established objectives. The knowledge environment thus will be the conduit for providing the information output and outreach from the Initiative, as well as the mechanism through which external participants can interact with the Initiative and with each other. More specifically, this online activity would establish and maintain an Internet portal and knowledge environment with (at least) the following capabilities.


 * Up-to-date descriptive and contact information for the Initiative and its participating organizations.
 * Descriptions of past, ongoing, and proposed projects and activities.
 * Links to publications produced under the Initiative and links to annotated bibliographies of publications (papers, presentations, reports, reviews, etc.).
 * Annotated links to relevant external resources (institutional repositories, similar initiatives, investigations of new services, etc.).
 * Frequently updated feed of GICSI and related news items (project and event announcements, publication releases, and reports of (with links to) related developments in information access policy, business, and technology, including a calendar of relevant events.
 * Support for a research "knowledge environment", including individual weblogs to support international discussion and evaluation of GICSI projects, proposals, events, etc.; wiki work spaces focused on key research issues; access to topically related data and information resources to enable research; and other related functions.
 * Support for a social network of interested participants, including individual profiles and e-mail listservs (consistent with all applicable privacy protection laws and policies).

B. Structure of the Work Plan
The GICSI work plan may be divided between those activities carried out under "Core and Continuing Programs" and "Special Projects".

1. Core and Continuing Programs

The suite of core and continuing programs are those programmatic functions that are essential to the success of the Initiative and that will operate continuously for its duration. These program elements comprise all strategic international functions, including:


 * The core and continuing tasks identified above under the four principal objectives of the Initiative, including the online open access knowledge environment and its supporting infrastructure;
 * An annual three-day GICSI Stakeholders' Conference;
 * An annual two-day meeting of the Advisory Board, which will immediately follow the GICSI Stakeholders' Conference; and
 * The Secretariat staff functions in support of the core and continuing programs.

2. Special Projects

Special projects are those undertaken in addition to core and continuing programs. Special projects are established by the CODATA Executive Board in consultation with the Secretariat and expert Advisory Board, and in response to sponsor interests. These may include commissioned papers by experts or the organization of various workshops, working groups, or seminars in well-defined topical areas. Possible special projects in the near term include:


 * Development of a registry of open access data centers and networks;
 * Operational implementation of Creative Commons copyright licenses for scientific information produced by the collaborating organizations of the Initiative and their constituencies, as well as through other affiliated stakeholder groups;
 * Development and implementation of Creative Commons licenses for databases and data sets;
 * Development of metrics and indicators of the benefits and costs of open access policies;
 * The assessment and promotion of best practices for archiving data linked to publications;
 * The development of a description language for scientific tools (so that search engines such as Google can be deployed by scientists looking for tools inside the commons).
 * Commissioned white papers in support of issue areas identified under GICSI objective #1;
 * Support of specific regional (and perhaps national) initiatives.