International Council for Science : Committee on Data for Science and Technology

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C O D A T A

Global Information Commons for Science Initiative-EU Activities

Objective of the Task Group

The Global Information Commons for Science Initiative is an international initiative of CODATA and a multi-stakeholder project arising from the second phase of the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis in November 2005. It has the overall goal to accelerate the development and scaling up of open scientific data and information resources on a global basis, with particular focus on "common use" licensing approaches. The aim of the GICSI EU Task group is to build on the exploratory activities of the Working Group and to develop an organisational and research capacity in Europe in order to promote and consolidate the GICSI-EU Initiative. The following themes have been chosen for the initial work of the Task Group. These will be expanded during the life span of the Task Group if approved :

(1) Impact of the current IPR regime and public domain policies on the scientific communities: analysis of the EC directives and the way they are implemented in the science communities, their impact on collaboration across the ERA, problems of lack of coordination among differing national approaches as a barrier to public domain initiatives.

(2) Alternative legal and technical regimes built by the scientific communities : use of common use licensing, copyleft licensing (how much software code in EU research is really open code), open access publishing ("some rights reserved" publishing for pre-print repositories, conference presentations etc.), evaluation of Digital Rights' Management (DRM).

(3) Public research institution's policies and practices for deposit of data and archiving of preprints and publicly funded research reports, dynamic distribution of metadata, and technical provision for preservation of the research record through standardisation of open formats and content migration.

(4) Data sharing in EU funded research: database federation in EU Research Infrastructures, common ontologies for data mining, harmonisation of privacy regulation for open access to content in biomedical research.

Over the last year, in order to expand these issues, the GICSI-EU Working Group successfully led discussions on behalf of CODATA in order to become a member of a European Thematic Network Agreement with the Politecnico of Turin, Italy on the "Public Domain in the Digital Age." This 36-partner project, known .as COMMUNIA, aims to build a network of organizations to become the single European point of reference for high-level policy discussion and strategic action for all issues relating to the public domain in the digital environment. COMMUNIA is funded for 3 years at a level of 1 million Euros from the European Commission. CODATA plans to take the lead on scientific data issues within this network, developing the themes mentioned above. It will work in collaboration with the UniversitC Catholique de Louvain (UCL) and Department of Economics "S. Cognetti de Martinis2'-University of Turin (DEPECONTUR).

CODATA signed the agreement last December and now plans to carry out a series of activities under this Network over the coming three years.

Membership

The following are members of the Working Group and are core proposed members of the Task Group:

(Additional members will be appointed from other European countries. Discussions are currently taking place with various people. As the names are not confirmed they are not listed here)

Chair: Paul A. David:
Senior Fellow - Oxford Internet Institute, Senior Fellow - Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, Professional Fellow of Merit. pad@stanford.edu

Tom Dedeurwaerdere: Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy of the "UniversitC catholique de Louvain" dedeunvaerdere@c~dr.ucl.ac.be

Jean MicheI Dalle: Adjunct Professor with University Pierre-et-Marie-Curie and a researcher with IMRI - University of Paris-Dauphine jean-michel.dalle@,uornc.fr -

Aldo Geuna: Senior Lecturer at SPRU - Science and Technology Policy Research, University of Sussex also lecturer Politecnico, Turin, Italy a.g.euna@sussex.ac.uk

Ed Steinmueller: Professor, Science, Policy, Research Unit, SPRU, The Freeman Centre, University of Sussex, Brighton, East Sussex, UK. w.e.steinmueller@,sussex.ac.uk

Although the group is focussing on specific issues it is hoped that through these activities, CODATA as an organization will develop a higher profile within the scientific community in Europe. This may eventually lead to an increase in European CODATA membership.