[GOAL] Re: RCUK & EC Did Not Follow Finch/Willets

[Peter Murray-Rust]

On Thu, Jul 26, 2012 at 11:35 AM, Stevan Harnad <harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk>wrote:

> On 2012-07-25, at 1:40 PM, LIBLICENSE wrote:
>
> > From: Ari Belenkiy <ari.belenkiy at gmail.com>
> > 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
+44-1223-763069
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