Review of Recent, Ongoing, and Proposed USNC/CODATA Activities
Roberta Balstad

US-China bilateral discussions on data sharing
Discussions moving toward concrete projects

Paul Uhlir: There’s been some disappointment in the results. The Chinese have been saying the right thing but not doing it. They haven’t been following through on the commitments that they seem to be making. There’s been some progress in their policy related to scientific data sharing. If there’s not more at the next meeting, the consensus seems to be that we should stop.

Q: Are there Chinese scientific databases accessible to U.S. scientists online? There’s very good connectivity. Maybe the next meeting should focus on a specific instance.
A: There’s been some progress in the biomedical area.
Q: This is an academic discussion between research communities, but the issues are actually controlled by government. Seismologists want to share the data, but whatever they say is trumped by the security community. Same thing when we say we want to share geospatial data but we can’t.
A: There’s a difference when you make a written promise and they don’t follow through.
Q: But discussions among the research community will have limitations.

Balstad: What is the efficacy of a bilateral arrangement? Is it more useful to take a multilateral focus?

Q: Key is to look for where to maximize impact, not repeat work of a government agency or particular discipline.
Q: China has tried hard to make some policy — at least now China has a policy. They’ve dedicated some money but there’s still little data open. Need for individual organizations to follow the national policy.

• Setting the Stage
• Openness
• Patents and Innovation
• Copyright Policy
• Patent Reform
• Innovation Inducement Prizes
• Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights
• Innovation, Creativity and Access to Knowledge: Software and The Internet
• Innovation and Access for Medical Technologies

I’m not sure if the audio, video, or slides will be posted online — if they are, I’ll link them from here at a later date. Also send me links to other blog or press coverage of the event.

There were good and less-good aspects of the conference, but I’m too exhausted to say much other than this:

When Lawrence Lessig announced he was shifting focus away from information policy, some people were concerned it might leave a vacuum of leadership in the field. With all the luminaries and young leaders at this conference, from across Europe and North America, doing remarkably varied work, it’s clear there’s no lack of leaders or good ideas.

The only question is whether policymakers will listen. After this conference, I’m hopeful.

Yesterday, my post on the openness session… disappeared. I don’t know where it went. (Another reason to update the WordPress install on this blog.) So, apologies.

Update: The post on the openness session has been found.

First, though, some quibbles:

• The editorial claims that open archiving hasn’t been very successful (specifically: “open archiving has been less successful [than gold OA], although government mandates are likely to increase future publication on internet repositories”). What about the nearly half-million articles in arXiv?
• The editorial’s use of the word “publication” to refer to deposit in repositories is unnecessarily confusing. Although some unpublished materials (such as theses and working papers) are deposited in repositories (which could be considered “publication”), the context here is previously published papers being deposited (“archived”, “posted”) in a repository.

So, the two aspects of OA which the editorial highlights:

• OA as competitive pressure on non-OA publishers. The editorial begins by stating how the recent Harvard policysent a “cold shudder [...] through the spine of the traditional publishing community”, and proceeds to ask, “How have traditional publishers responded to the research community’s interest in wider access to medical science?” It’s hard to compete with free, and — even where publishers don’t convert to OA — that competition forces publishers to improve their value proposition.
• OA as facilitator of pervasive and integrated information solutions. As the editorial argues,
  

  So what do doctors want from the information they use? They want quality and reliability. They want instant access whenever and wherever they need it. They want information in multiple formats, print, podcasts, and online. They want less, not more. They want to stay up-to-date. They want guidelines as well as individual research papers and systematic reviews. They want access to the views of key opinion leaders. They want information that is watermarked in such a way as to ensure its independence and integrity. They want information that is connected: research to reviews, images to text, testing to books. They want information to match their place and activity. Few medical publishers have paid attention to these needs. [...]

  What should editors and publishers do? They need to cast dullness to one side, and become leaders instead of followers. They need to start shaping the physician’s information world, instead of reacting to it. They need to pay less attention to their financial bottom line, and commit themselves to a larger, more inspiring mission—to join doctors in working to achieve the highest attainable standards of health for the communities they serve. Most medical publishers have forgotten that mission. It is time they returned to it.

  OA isn’t necessary for any of those purposes — but it sure makes it easier. Removing permission barriers facilitates developing innovative solutions to deliver information — not just to specialists, but to researchers in other fields and the public.