Access recommendations for UNESCO and WSIS The international participants at the conference, UNESCO Between Two Phases of the World Summit on the Information Society (St. Petersburg, May 17-19, 2005), drafted a Final Document to guide the upcoming WSIS meeting in Tunis. (Thanks to Julia Bolton Holloway.) Excerpt: The Conference recommendations...are intended specifically for UNESCO and through it for other international organisations, national governments, private sector, civil society, and research and education community. It was advised that the Conference recommendations presented in the Final Document be forwarded both to UNESCO and to the heads of the national delegations of the countries participating in the Summit’s preparatory process for submitting to the Tunis discussion. [Recommendations:]...to concentrate [UNESCO and UN-agency] financial resources on supporting or implementing self-sustainable Educational, Scientific and Cultural Information systems without costly recurrent licensing fees, with the help of Open Access repositories...; to support creation of second disclosure Open Access information resources whereby authors are describing the results of their research that have already been published elsewhere; to provide financial support to first and second disclosure Open Access resources to eliminate the need to charge publication fees; to support the creation of an association of Open Access Publishers to reinforce their effectiveness in collaboratively raising financial resources and in gaining collective renown; to create or support seed funding programs to create new Open Access information resources everywhere in the world and to promote the conversion of existing resources to the Open Access model; to require as a grant or endorsement condition publication in the Open Access model of any full report of research being even partially funded, or morally endorsed by them; to support and endorse the initiatives of Funding Institutions to implement their own mandatory Open Access Archives;...to build Open Access repositories in a way that would allow easy site mirroring as well as complete copying on portable media, such as CDs or DVDs, to allow access to knowledge in regions with little or non-existent Internet connections; to provide funding and in-kind assistance to a Free Software project that implements the peer-to-peer functionality as recommended by the WSIS Plan of Action to allow efficient exchange of scientific information;...to consider the problem of reasonable restriction of copyright principle for the sake of education, science, and culture in the Information Society and to develop the guiding policy principles for improving access to official public information;...to encourage creation of programs of acquiring non-exclusive intellectual property rights to support the Information Society development; to facilitate creation of community centres providing free access to legal information.