Science Commons Announcements

["Donna Wentworth" <dwentworth AT creativecommons.org>]

ESOF 2008 satellite event: Collaborating for the future of open science

June 4th, 2008 by dwentworth

Momentum is building behind "open" approaches to scientific endeavor, which have tremendous potential for accelerating discovery by making research faster, easier and more efficient. These approaches are often collectively referred to as "open science," but both the term and its underlying principles have yet to be defined by the global scientific community.

Science Commons works to connect and empower people and organizations developing open science in nations across the globe. This July, we are convening a free, open workshop in Barcelona, Spain, to discuss and define the basic principles for open science, including identifying the key tenets for a system to be recognized as an "open science" system. The goal is to conclude the workshop with a set of shared principles that can effectively guide the development of a collaborative infrastructure for knowledge sharing — one that increases the value of each independent contribution to the global knowledge commons.

The workshop, one of three satellite events preceding the Euroscience Open Forum (ESOF), takes place July 16 -17, 2008, and will be held at the Institut d'Estudis Catalans. It will feature keynote presentations by James Boyle, Chairman of the Board at Creative Commons and a founder of Science Commons, and Mario Campolargo of the European Commission. Our co-sponsors are the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University (CSPD) and the Institut d'Estudis Catalans (IEC).

Participants are already gearing up for the workshop. Ignasi Labastida i Juan, project lead for Creative Commons Spain and Catalonia, is a co-organizer, and in the current issue of IPR-Helpdesk Bulletin, he calls on universities across Europe to implement the European University Association's (EUA) recommendations for opening access to the research that faculty produce — an effort that could prove to be a tipping point in transforming the way we share and build scientific knowledge.

"For many years, scientists have done research, have written and have reviewed articles, and have paid for accessing journals without expecting any economic compensation because they only wanted attribution and reputation to following their career," he writes. "This situation of publish or perish has been used by publishers to monopolize that knowledge, mainly created in universities and research centres, and they have used the copyright to lock it even forbidding reproductions on authors' websites or authors' institution portals. Fortunately things are changing."

Hear, hear. If you'd like to join us for a discussion to establish a set of foundational principles that can foster the growth of open science worldwide, we invite you to check out the details and register here. The workshop is free and open to the public, but seating is limited, so if you are able to attend, we encourage you to register now.

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Donna Wentworth
Communications Specialist
Science Commons
http://sciencecommons.org
dwentworth AT creativecommons.org
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