Friends: Here are two items from Peter Suber's blog. Arun [Subbiah Arunachalam] More on GICS Shuichi Iwata, Opening Remarks at the CODATA Session 1 within the Eighth Plenary Session of the World Summit on the Information Society, November 18, 2005. Iwata is the President of CODATA. Excerpt: At the first WSIS meeting in Geneva in December 2003, 175 countries adopted a landmark Declaration of Principles and Plan of Action....Article 10 of the Agenda for Action recognizes the importance of “Access to Information and Knowledge,” and Article 23 recognizes the important role of “e-Science.” Many actors and organizations within the scientific community already are engaged in activities that address these issues, in particular the importance of widespread access to scientific data and information. However, there is a growing perception of the need to coordinate and integrate these efforts. With this in mind, CODATA consulted extensively during the past year with the International Council for Science (ICSU), the International Council of Scientific and Technical Information (ICSTI), the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP), the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (TWAS), the Science Commons, UNESCO, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), CERN, and scientists and scholars from around the world. Earlier this week, we held a special event at a WSIS Satellite Event here in Tunis to launch a new initiative to create the Global Information Commons for Science. The Global Information Commons for Science Initiative is a multi-stakeholder undertaking with the following goals: (1) Improved understanding and increased awareness of the societal benefits of easier access to and use of scientific data and information, particularly those resulting from publicly funded research activities; (2) Wider adoption of successful methods and models for providing open availability on a sustainable basis and facilitating reuse of publicly-funded scientific data and information, as well as cooperative sharing of research materials and tools among researchers; and (3) Encouragement and coordination of the efforts of the many stakeholders in the world’s diverse scientific community who are engaged in efforts to devise and implement effective means to achieve these objectives, with particular attention to data and knowledge transfer from haves to not-haves, e.g., next generations, non-experts, developing countries. The Initiative will not duplicate existing efforts . Rather, it will provide a shared global platform to supplement and support members’ work on existing initiatives. To become a partner, organizations will need to make a commitment to undertake one or more activities that contribute to the stated goals. ------ Will open-source commitment lead to open-access commitment? Seven universities, four corporations, and one foundation announced a breakthrough plan yesterday "to accelerate collaborative research for open source software". From the press release (December 19): Specifically, the companies and universities agreed: [1] That intellectual property arising from selected research collaborations will be made available free of charge for commercial and academic use. [2] To an established set of guidelines that address the rights of the participants and the public. These twelve enterprises believe the principles will accelerate innovation and contribute to open source software research across a breadth of initiatives, thus enabling the development of related industry standards and greater interoperability, while managing intellectual property in a more balanced manner....Pervasive acceptance of the open collaboration principles by other universities and the IT industry, as well as the development of guiding principles for other research agreements remains at the core of the Summit team's continuing agenda. The goal is to shorten the time from the first spark, or idea, to the commencement of research on that idea. Summit participants developing and adopting these principles include the Kauffman Foundation, Carnegie Mellon University (Penn.), Georgia Institute of Technology, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (N.Y.), Stanford University (Calif.), University of California at Berkeley, University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign, The University of Texas at Austin, Cisco, HP, IBM and Intel. Additional collaborators include the National Science Foundation, the Office of U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman and the National Academies' Government University Industry Research Roundtable (GUIRR). Comment. This is about open-source software, not open-access to research literature or data. But there are so many principles common to the two that the universities in the OS pact should be ready to adopt similar policies on OA, such as requiring or encouraging their faculty to deposit postprints of their published journal articles in an OA institutional repository. Update. Here's a nice nugget from Steve Lohr's story about the agreement in yesterday's New York Times. "This a great start to addressing the problem," said Peter A. Freeman, assistant director for computer and information science and engineering at the National Science Foundation. "It's a recognition by both sides that for precompetitive research, 'It's the science, stupid.' It's not the intellectual property."