From: Peter Murray-Rust <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2012 12:59:02 +0100
On Thu, Jul 26, 2012 at 11:35 AM, Stevan Harnad <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> On 2012-07-25, at 1:40 PM, LIBLICENSE wrote:
>
> > From: Ari Belenkiy <[log in to unmask]>
> > Date: Tue, 24 Jul 2012 18:50:34 -0700
> >
> > 1. Why the EU research must be immediately open for the non-EU
> > researchers (who are not, in particularly, EU-taxpayers)?
>
> > 2. Why the EU taxpayers, who contribute different amounts in tax, must
> > have equal opportunities to access the results of the EU research?
The biomedical community has built up a publicly funded system of
top-quality information resources which are contributed to by the
whole world and which are available to the whole world. It is
inconceivable that we could compartmentalize this to a system where
information was restricted by country or by funder.
There are the following reasons for globalness:
* scientific unification. Scientists align themselves with their
discipline (peers) , their contributors and their beneficiaries - not
with their institution or country. Imagine if (say) Europe refused to
let scientists in infected countries have access to research on
malaria and these refused to let Europe have samples. And local
problems are now globale problems - Europe will be less and less
immune from malaria both through global warming and through
globalization of the human race.
* economics. It is more inefficient to have localised resources which
have problems of duplication, non-communication, incompleteness, etc.
than to have world centres available to everyone. The Eur Bioinf Inst.
(EBI) has a model where research contributions are shared between
countries, where each contributes its speciality for the benefit of
all.
* synergy. Science now and especially in the future will be about
synthesising information rather than reductionism. This has to be
completely free and with zero discovery time. Then we will all reap
the benefits of science.
The economic benefits of science come to those who have invested in
the science. It may be true that in restricted areas (such as nuclear
weapons) this has to be done on a country-by-country basis. But in
general the countries that benefit are those which have a professional
infrastructure which produces high quality people (science, business,
etc.) who can move rapidly. The EU has (rightly) taken the decision to
open its research - its main problem IMO is to find the entrepreneurs
and the business culture and tax/legal system that allows rapid take
up and wealth creation.
The US NIH has done a great job of providing global resources for
biomedical science. Its Pubmed Central is a great vision without which
all countries would be seriously impoverished. Unfortunately most of
it is closed to most of the world by the toll-access publishers and
their lack of vision and restrictive practices. Switzerland built
Swissprot and the US helped financially when it was in trouble. The
EBI .in UK supports many unique resources including those for drug
discovery (ChemBL). Japan created the Kyoto Enzyme database (KEGG)
though this cannot be sustained now on a free-to-access model. and so
on.
The challenge - which not enough people are addressing - is how to use
part of the huge resources in science funding (perhaps 100-1000
Billion USD/ yr) to build a completely Open (libre) system for
scientific publication and information. Europe should be praised for
its commitment to this and we should come up with new ways of doing
this - neither Green nor Gold can achieve more than partial and
incompatible solutions. The countries that invest in Open information
will be the ones best placed to exploit the coming Open information
revolution.
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
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