Date: Wed, 26 Jul 2006 07:18:23 +0530 From: Subbiah Arunachalam Dear Friends: Chinese Academy of Sciences will soon enable 90 institutions to share data via a computer network, says a news story in Peter Suber's blog "Open Access News". Please note Suber's comment at the end. The Internet and the web offer unforeseen possibilities for information flow and knowledge exchange, which if adopted quickly can make the field level playing in the matter of accessing and disseminating information and knowledge. We can ignore them only at our peril! We in India must act fast and adopt open source software, open access archiving, collaborative research through grid computing and knowledge sharing through data sharing through nationwide networks. Best wishes. Arun [Subbiah Arunachalam] --------------------------------- Data sharing coming to China Zi Xun, China plans massive data sharing project, SciDev.Net, July 24, 2006. Excerpt: The Chinese Academy of Sciences is planning a large-scale computer project to make it easier for researchers at its 90 institutes to share their data....Over the next four years, data from the academy's institutes will be entered into hundreds of databases, and computing tools will be made available to help researchers analyse the data.... The e-Science project aims to tackle the problem of poor data sharing in the scientific community....[Nan Kai of the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Computer Network Information Center] says that the e-Science platform will be freely accessible to scientists outside the academy, as well as the public. Liu Mian, of the US-based University of Missouri, says that besides developing the infrastructure, the government should also stipulate that researchers must share their data by sending them to public databases such as the e-Science project. Peter Suber's Comment. This is a notable development that should greatly accelerate research in China. I support Liu Mian's suggestion that the government mandate deposit in the new OA system. If the Chinese combine the right policy with the right technology, it will maximize its return on the investment in its new and powerful infrastructure.