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