IGF 2010
VILNIUS, LITHUANIA
17 SEPTEMBER 10
SESSION 156
1130
WHY WE NEED AN OPEN WEB:
OPEN KNOWLEDGE GOVERNANCE FOR INNOVATION
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Note: The following is the output of the real-time captioning taken during Fifth Meeting of the IGF, in Vilnius. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the session, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> STUART HAMILTON: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I would like to welcome you all to the session titled Why We need an Open Web: Open Knowledge Governance for Innovation. My name is Stuart Hamilton and I am the senior policy advisor at the International Federation of Library Associations.
Some practical issues, to begin the format of this morning's session will involve us beginning with a podcast before we are able to hear presentations from four speakers on our subjects. And if we have time we will also have a third podcast on the subject of open science. We will take some questions following each paper presentation, but I would like to reassure you that there will be plenty of time for discussion at the end. I am sure many of you have been in this room during the IGF and that there are sometimes noise issues. But our remote moderator is going to help us bring through questions from outside and I hope we should be able to have a relatively smooth session. If you do have some trouble with the noise you can always follow the session remotely using the remote participation on your laptops. And if you are in front of the microphone it might be worth making sure that that is over during a podcast because we understand there has been some issues on that front.
So this morning's session, this workshop is going to discuss the concept of openness, openness for maximizing the creation and sharing of knowledge in the network digital environment.
Network digital resources have been a critically important basis for the information services that are delivered by libraries. And in many countries public and educational libraries are the major or only agencies that provide people with free or affordable access to these resources. In doing so libraries make a huge contribution to the culture, social and economic development and are a key player in the information chain.
So this morning's session is going to look a little bit further at the contribution we make through the presentations on the concept of openness and how libraries turn this in to reality. All aspects of the open web are going to be defined. We are going to look at open science, open standards, open educational resources and our speakers will explore the accountability that libraries have to make information available to our users. Libraries have a responsibility to make this concept of openness concrete. We are going to look at openness from a development perspective with an emphasis on library's work on developing countries. However, we are not going to neglect the key role that libraries play in all communities around the world and the diverse user groups that we have.
We are going to move straightforward in to the first podcast presentation. All of the speakers are going to introduce themselves this morning. So I get off quite lightly on giving biographies. But the first speaker will be John Wilbanks and John has provided us with a presentation via a podcast which will give us an overview on the open web. Andrius, if you could cue the podcast and I hope you all have a good view of the television.
>> JOHN WILBANKS: You see a lot more computers and servers. They mainly tended to be in the United States or in Europe and they were really big. Nobody really had one in their house. But at this exact time we had the rise of the personal computing revolution and the home computing revolution. And what was allowable because of the advances of the Internet and the advances of the personal computer happening around the same time and because the original architecture of the network had permissive culture, people could be connecting their home, personal computers to the Internet and they could run software through the Internet that they never expected.
Architecture of the Internet allowed unexpected innovations, and one of those innovations is probably the most famous of them is the World Wide Web. This is the first World Wide Web page that Tim Learners wrote in Switzerland. He didn't have to ask permission in order to release this on to the Internet because it used the standard systems and protocols he was able to release and users were able to use it. And the architects of the web understood the same things that the architects did of the Internet. It allowed for sort of unexpected innovation. So innovation of the world web was designed for physics data to be shared and it has turned to be something that we use on our phone. It has turned in to architecture that creates the capacity for unexpected innovation and what we have also seen as the Web has emerged as a critical piece of social infrastructure is the emergence of the library as an access point to digital resources. This is not surprisingly. The library has always been a gateway to knowledges in analog as well as a digital world. At the last IGF and the last IFL General Assembly in Egypt we thought about the fact that libraries as an access point to digital resources were underrepresented in the IGF.
And it is not simply that libraries are a part of universities. Libraries are a place where people get access to the Internet. People get access to the network and it is growing as a place for people to get access to content, to knowledge. Libraries are going to play a pretty big role in terms of a in terms of access to article, journals. As we move toward a web of data and a web of larger access to giant scientific resources that's available to the world libraries are going to have a changing role and I will explore that in my second presentation later in the panel. But for the purposes of this let's stay focused on the traditional role. A gateway to textbooks, a gateway to literature and a gateway to journals, a gateway to newspapers. And so what we have seen is actually that the open web concept, this idea of permissiveness, standards, intraoperability embedded in architecture has begun to form knowledge and not technology. The Internet is the way to connect computers and move bits around computers and the Web at its core is to format and publish documents and to retrieve those documents.
When we think about the open Internet and the open web what we mean is the knowledge we put in to those documents. And the example that a lot of people think of when they think this is Wikopedia. It is a place where the world's knowledge is collected, edited, shared and remixed.
But it is not enough to do that to just have the Web and to just have the Internet. You begin to need to get at things like documents standards. You begin to get at things like the legal system that is allowed and remixing of that knowledge and content.
So one way to think of this is that we have used the Web to create a content layer but the content layer begins to create different sorts of requirements. There is the legal requirements which were addressed to things like creative common licenses but also need to begin to address more complicated issues at content layer like semantics. What does something mean? And in the sciences and library context the first place we really deal with this is in the journals transformation from physical artifacts to digital. Journals are where contemporary scholarship get published and transferred. And the advent of the open web over the last ten years has been followed by the advent of what's called the open access movement. And the open access movement is this idea that all the world's scholarship should be available via the Internet and the Web. Free to download, free to mix, free to translate and this insight that we could do with the world's knowledge really came out of the world of the open web and the open Internet.
And so I have put in here one of the core definitions of open access to those scholarly literature and I have highlighted the free availability on the public Internet, and this permits users anywhere to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, crawl for indexing, pass data to software or to use them for any lawful purpose. So that's a profound idea which is that the world's scholarly knowledge should be available because of public Internet, and embedded in this definition of access to literature is this idea of publicness and openness and permissiveness. So we can see the ideas on the open web and the architecture of the open Internet recapitulated of this knowledge. We have got to actually take those ideas of those technical standards and extend them up in to the knowledge layer, up in to the content layer. Or we are not going to gain the full benefit of the public Internet. And, of course, if the Internet itself is no longer public, then the capacity and the opportunity offered by open access is itself not going to be fully real.
So what this is about is bringing this intraoperability that we have for computers and for documents and bringing it to the content of those documents themselves. And when we begin to think about what happens as we scale this out away from a web of just documents to a web of data, to a web where the human genome is available anywhere in the world we can begin to see how the Web we have got in the absence of some sort of entity, some sort of player who can store data and help us understand it and who can begin to help us annotate it. And this is going from the last slide to a structured view of the genome where we see what a gene does and what it doesn't do. In the absence of the open architecture of the web and in the absence of the entities to help us structure and find access we won't realise the potential at the content layer that we have realised at the document layer and the computer layer. And this is all about the idea of a web of data. But it is going to be essential that the open Internet, the public Internet communities understand the importance of the move to a web of data. And as well as to understand the need for new stakeholders that can step in and help us deal with the Web of data and get the benefit out of that, we get out of the web documents. And this really gets to the idea of engaging new stakeholders and bringing those stakeholders in to the policy debates of the public Internet and the public web.
So one good example of what we can bring from the library and the open access and content layer community to the IGF is this debate about public access to public goods. This is a Web site that the U.S. Government deployed which guarantees access to any scholarly literature that is funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health. It is a policy of access at the content layer that recapitulates the content that we have on the Web and Internet. This didn't come about because of a proactive desire of the Government to do. It came about because a bunch of stakeholders that got together. And a broad coalition of NGO, that have done a remarkable job of influencing policy in the United States and in many other countries now to embed this concept of this architecture of openness intraoperability at the knowledge layer.
Now SPARC which is represented on this panel was a huge part of this. It comes out of the United States and international library community. IFL who is also on this representing the libraries and developing and transition countries. Again a key part of the stakeholder coalition that helped us develop international policies. Creative Commons where I work which represents the legal aspect.
And last but not least the students and the other sorts of communities that are part of the research university who have really begun to find their voice in the movement. And so this sort of broad stakeholder coalition that might not be thinking of public Internet and the public Web they are thinking about that content layer which what they see every day when they go through libraries and universities. And I think that engaging that sort of broad stakeholder coalition that this group and panel can talk about can inform the content layer and hopefully we can bring some of this knowledge back from our own engagement in the policy realm and begin to think about how we can take some of the energy from we have been doing in the open access movement and connect that to the open Internet.
There is just a few questions that I hope we learn today at the panel. What can we learn from each other? What can IGF teach and what can we bring back and inform the IGF? How does the open science inform us? What's the best for us to engage together and how do we best integrate the library and the library community and the stakeholders? Because from all of this we can begin to understand the best way that we can govern the knowledge that moves around on the public Internet, the data, the information inside the documents, semantics and all of the sort of information that really represents the next layer of the network. And how do we bring all that together and make sure that it is both part of the IGF debate and informed by it and with that I will stop. I will turn it over to our moderator. And I thank you again and hopefully I will be participating with you in the remote participation via chat and WebEx. Thank you very much.
>> STUART HAMILTON: So John has posed some questions for us but if you do have any questions for John, he is available via the remote moderation.
>> Make sure
>> STUART HAMILTON: Yeah. Because of the time lag and because John will need to type his answers I would encourage you if you have some questions related to his first presentation that you can either submit them via the remote moderation interface or if you are here without a laptop please feel free to visit our remote moderators who can move on to John. We are moving to our paper presentation and we are lucky to have with us today Eddan Katz who is the international affairs director for the Electronic Frontier foundation. He will speak to us about open standards and open resources.
>> EDDAN KATZ: Thank you very much and I appreciate the invitation to be part of this panel and the structure in the way in which openness is important for different layers and aspects of the Internet. And I wanted to add to what John said in terms of by the way of just small overview, the impact of openness on innovation and on the way that the Internet was developed technically comes to mind in terms of also of the way that people relate to each other and ethically, that the openness and its impact especially on education I will be talking about is I think quite relevant. There was a philosopher who was born in Lithuania in Kaunas. Emmanuel Tota and in his book it interplayed these concepts: It is a relationship with a surplus always exterior to the totality. Although the objective totality did not fill out the true measure of being another concept, the concept of infinity were needed to express this transcendence with regard to totality. You can't totalize. There is an openness to the other and infinity.
Now this sounds quite abstract but in regards to open educational resources it is quite relevant whether or not the text, the textbook and the resource materials which people learn with are static, are ones that are handed down, are developed by a publishing company that is remote to your particular location and your cultural context or whether they are dynamic and can evolve and develop. And in open education resources we have seen a very impressive development of this repository of materials that are able to be used in classrooms all over the world and everywhere from the initiatives that have taken place in North American universities led by most prominently MIT, the Hewitt projects to encourage universities to make their classroom materials available to the world. Enables people to take the open resources and use them in their teaching curricula in different places. The cost of the textbooks, the cost of these materials which are sometimes so prohibitive as not being able to be used are therefore with initiatives like the open courseware initiative available.
Within the IGF the open educational resources have taken the form of there is a Dynamic Coalition on digital education that had a especially in Rio in the second IGF was related to the notion that in the Internet Governance space and it is not just the wires and the tubes of the Internet but this is also about the access to the content. The content layer that John was suggesting is quite relevant whether or not they are open or not. So something that was part of that initiative and then is taken up also in the Capetown Declaration. And I refer you to capetowndeclaration.org, is a call for developers of technology and for developers of curricula and for policymakers and activists to focus on the need for open educational resources to open up the educational environment, make at least the units of what the curriculum is made up of less expensive and more available.
One particular strategy that I think is relevant and should be taken up is the notion of the procurement process on the part of Governments and, for example, ministries of education. The ministry of education as a source in many countries the decision making in regards to the curricula can make those decisions to procure open access, open educational resource material which changes the market entirely as the largest purchasers of educational materials and makes those now niche a repository ecosystem of knowledge, a centre stage in the educational process.
In Montevideo, Uruguay there is what ministry of education and officers that made a commitment for educators to focus on open education materials. Because the mixing of those materials, the open education resources which are licensed openly and freely available when they come in to contact which is inevitable with copyrighted and protected materials, there is a problem and the Creative Commons model runs in to at least a legal obstacle for making these materials available. So interesting projects such as the DiploFoundation's educational projects where students simultaneously log in to a classroom and learn together. As a legal matter if they were using copyrighted works it would most likely be an illegal setting to teach.
They use open educational resources and materials, develop their own, make them available and make as part of the teaching process and the learning process an interactive one where the students not only absorb material but also contribute material. Other interesting projects to note that make use of open educational resources the global teenager project that is several countries in Africa and South America where students in areas where they otherwise would not have access to organised classrooms have access to these materials since those materials the largest obstacle is usually the cost. The work of UNESCO in this area on open educational resource has been very forward thinking and led the way and we hope that those projects continue and move forward.
I would like to also relate this to I was asked to talk about open standards. Open standards has been also talked a lot about at IGF. The Dynamic Coalition on Open Standards is relevant to this work in that with general topics, I was on a panel earlier on accessibility making products and making content available in different formats, depends on the open standard for that to be possible. And the open standards are defined as those which are developed in a way open to input from multiple parties, and also made available to those who want to add on to the underlying units of code that can be built upon in an open standards format. And an important strategy again and this is where the open educational resources notion with ministries of education move forward is this Government procurement and something that has been advanced both here at the IGF in the declaration that was put together in Hyderabad, also I refer you to the Web to read it fully, made a commitment to narrow and focus the definition of open standards as it's controversial and take that towards Government agencies that can make a difference in the ecosystem of software by purchasing and making requirements for open standards as being a criteria for purchasing and the products that they buy.
I am reminded because I have Ben Akoh in the Sali workshop that he helped put together that the ministers of information and technology of the various West African countries did commit to the procurement of open standards software and I think this is the pragmatic direction that organisation and coordination in the coalitions here can make a difference in advancing the open knowledge web and ecosystem that exists on the net. Thank you.
>> STUART HAMILTON: Thank you, Eddan. So Eddan has given us some good examples there of the value of open educational resources and the importance of open standards in making those resources work. I would like to leave some space here if you have some questions for Eddan at this point on his presentation. Does anybody have any comments or questions on Eddan's presentation at this point? Well, we, of course, have plenty of time for discussion following the other presentations. So we will move forward now.
Our next speaker is Iryna Kuchma who is from one of the organisers of this panel and she is the open access programme manager at EIFL and she will discuss in her presentation open access in developing countries. Iryna.
>> IRYNA KUCHMA: Thank you, Stuart, and good morning. Can you hear me well or should I speak okay. I would like to share with you some observations about open access to research materials and about evolving school environment. I work for EIFL which is an international non profit organisation with a global network of partners. And we work in 47 countries in Africa, Asia and in Europe. And our mission is to enable access to knowledge through libraries in developing and transition countries to contribute to sustainable economic and social development.
We have like two pillars, two coinitiatives. And one coinitiative is called access to knowledge for education, learning and research and here we have an open access programme which I manage. We also have free and open source software programme, copyright programme, and consortium management programme because we work with library consortia and we also have a programme on affordable access to commercial information. And another pillar we have is access to knowledge for sustainable livelihoods and here we work with public libraries to support some innovative services that public libraries provide.
In open access programme we advocate for open access policies and mandates by research funding agencies, universities and research organisations in developing and transition countries and we also build capacity to set up open access repository and to make these repositories sustainable. And we also empower educators, students, teachers to become open access advocates. And in the past two years we organised 38 workshops with participants from over 50 countries. We are happy in our network we have 17 open access mandates. Research funders and universities require open access to publicly funded research and we also have a very large network of open access repository projects.
We work with 265 open access repositories in 38 countries and we work with over 2,000 publishers of open access journals. We have a large network of expertise and this year we released two reports. One is an open repository development in developing and transition countries which provides best practices in setting up open access repositories in developing countries. And another report is about using open content license in open access journals and open repositories.
The context in which we work, why do we work in the area of open access because obviously current research practice does not adequately meet the needs of all stakeholders. We have millions of educators, researchers, small businesses, students, physicians, families that don't have affordable access to high quality research information.
And in developing countries we do have a lot of very valuable research here in such areas as malnutrition, hunger, agriculture, tropical diseases as this research results even to policymakers in these countries that are working to achieve millennium goals. It needs to be accessible for globally and locally if we want to contribute to solving local and global problems and also important to preserve knowledge. We believe that open access for researchers provide increased visibility, usage and impact of their work.
We believe that open access research institutions also provides increased visibility, impact, provides complete records of research outputs in easily accessible form. And it also provides means to manage and evaluate research programmes run by research organisations and universities and also believes that for publishers open access provides increased leadership, citations and visibility impact and indeed the best research dissemination for research. It is digital and online and free of charge and free of most copyright. You can also use it, reuse it, build on it without asking for permissions. And some of you have been in the panel this morning about open knowledge environment and we had a quotation "Innovations without permission." So this open access literature you can use it, reuse without asking for permission. It is accessible with copyright, with revenue and you can make profit while you are managing open access projects. It is compatible with print, with preservation, with prestige, career advancement and indexing and all other features that support services associated with literature.
Open access is implemented in two ways. One way is open access journals and these journals use funding models that doesn't charge readers or their institutions to have access to and users can read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, have full access to articles. Two weeks ago I was in Nairobi with Professor Mary Younger who is a researcher in the Department of Horticulture at John Macada University. She publishes most of her work in open access journals and by doing this her work becomes internationally recognized and she receives a lot of feedback from colleagues all over the world. And she spoke that open access journals are very important at this point in time because everyone here is to benefit. Because when you are doing your research it doesn't make sense when you put your research somewhere, under the table or in the closets or you need to share information and research, however little this research might be. As long as this research might have even a tiny impact on the development, on people's livelihoods, on people's way of thinking. Open access journals do help to reach to all stakeholders, like researchers, policymakers, consumers students and farmers.
An example I have is from a researcher in Hungary, Dr. Betlon. And he does his research and it is a very new research area. So he decided to publish his work in open access because he wanted to get feedback from the research community. And he published in the open access journal and he shared a link to his full text publication open access on Twitter, and what happens next, sir. His paper became the most viewed research paper in the last months in by Met Central Journal. He published and he received many e mails with relevant questions and had interesting discussions on Twitter and actually found some colleagues working in the same field and he got invitations for collaboration from several international labs. And they asked do you think it happened because I choose an open access journal and he answered yes indeed.
And I am really wondering to hear what are your stories in this area. And another way how you can achieve open access is via open access repositories. And these open access repositories are intraoperable. They form a global research facility and they support common metadata. And the way these repositories operate researchers, scholars, students can publish their research papers in subscription base journals. But they deposit their journals in institutions. In 2009 every research article was available in open access and I think it is kind of a good result and I am sure next year the result will be even better. What kind of article content could be in institutional repositories apart from journal articles, dissertations, unpublished reports and working papers, conference and workshop papers, book chapters and sections, multimedia, audio/visual material and software and some other items. And these open repositories help to publicize institutions trends. They provide maximum return on investment. They can be mandated by institutions and it speeds up the development and they are a very good tool for administrative tool for institutions.
Because their free and open software are used to set up repositories they are very low startup costs and remaining benefits to get. Some policymakers are have already realised these benefits and, for example, in South Africa, South African issued report recommending all their members set up open access repositories and practice open access publishing. So what started on in the UK, in the Netherlands, in Denmark about benefits open access would bring to national research and education systems and it is there will be considerable savings. Like millions of Euros of savings if the national research system would go open access. And we are working on one project which is called Open Air and this project is about implementing an open access policy pilot in the European Commission. Because since August 2008 European Commission mandates open access to research results in seven research areas. Supported by FB7 programme which is the largest programme that supports research in the European union.
So it is more than 50 billion support programme. And the reasons they introduced open access mandate is because they believe that when research is disseminated widely and effectively then it is a guarantee to maximum exploitation and it is it does bring impact. And it also helps to increase impact on European union investments in research and development and it helps to avoid wasting time and valuable resources on duplicative research and once wide access to wide selection of literature researchers can build upon this knowledge and can process their work and small and medium size businesses and entrepreneurs benefit from it. National Governments that also mandated open access to research results and I am from Ukraine and Ukraine has a national law mandating open access publicly funded research and we heard an example from China which mandated open access to data and information.
I would like to end up with some recommendations what, researchers and students can do to support open access, can publish articles in open access. They can spread the word about open access. Research managers and research administrators can introduce open access policies and set up repositories and spread word about open access and, of course, libraries have always been the greatest promoters and implementers of open access projects because these libraries set up open repositories. Libraries help researchers and students to self archive. Libraries help to publish open access journals and create educational resources and help in data management and spread the word about open access. Thank you.
>> STUART HAMILTON: Thank you very much, Iryna. Are there any questions for Iryna immediately after the presentation? Yes, sir. Sorry?
>> Only for remote presentation, right? It is okay.
>> STUART HAMILTON: Okay. Okay. Well, I can see we have a remote question. Is that correct?
>> Yes, we have a comment to Iryna from one of the remote participants. We currently have 14 participants logged in remotely from a number of different countries including Armenia, Macedonia, Egypt, UK, Italy and the U.S. They are all following the presentations. The comment to Iryna is from Mandy Tahar in Egypt. She said it is remarkable how the open access movement is using Web 2.0 tools to promote access to research work. And that there should be some more training for librarians on these Web 2.0 tools in developing countries to help disseminate open access.
>> STUART HAMILTON: We hope there will be further questions coming in. In his introduction John Wilbanks mentioned importance of SPARC in promoting open access and we are lucky enough to have with us this morning Julia Mortyakova and she will speak to us about open access to research from the perspective of researchers and students. Julia.
>> JULIA MORTYAKOVA: Thank you so much. It is a honour and my pleasure to be here and I'd also like to thank the open web for making open access possible for all of us. Libraries have organised to form an important and effective nexus to influence the development of policies relating to open access and the open web. They have coordinated the activities of stakeholders, groups ranging from higher education groups to patient advocacy in order to voice support for such policies. Their efforts have been demonstratively effective with results with the highly successful policy and introduction of federal research public acts and as well as public access held in the U.S. House of Representatives and the high level of example. I will speak for about each one of those initiatives a little later on. And the second coalition that is emerging and deserves attention is the student movement on open access. This movement is growing both by number and influence. This movement has been nurtured and supported directly by the library community and operates as an important group at the local and national level.
As you can probably tell I am wearing two hats here. So the first organisation I represent is SPARC which is Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition is basically a coalition of libraries which was formed by the library community specifically to be a catalyst for action in ways that leverage the network digital environment and in doing so help to reduce financial pressures on library. And the second movement which I represent which is the Pershing student movement, a coalition of students of 5 million thus far that advocate for open access policies but we are supported in every way possible by the library community and by SPARC. So I am actually the advocacy coordinator.
Next slide, please. So I think I hope you guys can see the slide. I think it is important when we talk about open access in particular from a student's point of view to realise why it is important and I just threw up a couple of journals so you can see their prices. There are journals ranging from $5,000 a year to $25,000. So as you may be able to tell there is no library in the world that can afford access to all of them. Next slide. So what happens is students and researchers and the general public find their access being denied.
Next slide. Now why is open access important? Iryna gave us some examples but I think this is interesting. There was an article in the New York Times about a group of scientists and executives that basically collaborated in 2003. They came together and they realised that this old model of collaboration is not working and we need to do something, and they actually decided to have this project which was an open access initiative to help progress research on Alzheimer's disease.
So I am from the United States. So I don't want this to be very U.S. centric but I wanted to give you some examples of what's happening in the U.S. Congress. They are all very driven by this community of libraries and students and other stakeholders that are out there actively lobbying and advocating for this to take place. All publicly funded research, research paid through tax dollars. The results of the articles that come from it is open to the public within six months of publication. This was introduced in the U.S. Senate in June of 2009 and in the House of Representatives in April of 2010. There has also been a hearing on this subject of public access to publicly funded research in the U.S. House of Representatives. It allowed stakeholders to voice their opinions and I will briefly describe what has been said at that hearing a little bit later on.
I want to go back to the National Institute of Health 2008 and at this hearing on the topic of public access to federally funded research David Littler actually described the policy. Policy is online repository called PUG Net Central which is an open access repository. This is what has happened. Result, 700,000 full text articles have been deposited since 2008. This Web site gets 420,000 unique users per day. That's how many people actually use this information. 99 percent of the articles in the database are downloaded at least once. 25 percent are university users. 40 percent are regular citizens. 17 percent are companies and the remainder are Government or others. Extremely popular and I think it really displays the need for information and how hungry people are to really have access to it. Should also mention that the U.S. executive branch, the White House also put a request for information on the topic of access to federally funded research in January of 2010 and the White House is currently preparing a report and recommendation based on the comments that they saw.
So to go back to the hearing on public access in the U.S. House of Representatives, the different stakeholders groups I wanted to briefly mention some narratives that they presented and they have really showed the need for open access. We had an NGO in private research, funder from Autism Speaks. We had a patient advocate, Sharon Teri and I think her story was extremely powerful because her son was diagnosed with a rare disease and she and her husband had to hack in to a medical database in order to research this disease because they did not have access and as a result of that founded a foundation. They created a diagnostic test and created trials. Her husband is a trade school graduate. This shows how average people who are not involved with this research. Imagine what this could do all of us if we had it. We had and I think one thing that came out of his testimony was he talked about science fairs for secondary and primary schools and how these students have no access to this. Because if universities can't afford it certainly secondary, primarily schools cannot and how we are hindering progress for young children with their interest and passion for science.
We had David Littler and the public library of science demonstrate a model growing sector marketplace of how successful open access journals can be. We had economists speak. The director of the Digital Connections Council from the committee for economic development which is an organisation of university presidents, Fortune 500 CEOs and independent organisations.
And finally we had a representative from higher education speak about how open access is essential to the mission of higher education institutions.
So now okay. I think it is a it is kind of a different slide but that's okay. Now I will talk about the student movement. The student movement is relatively new. It is one year old and so far we are 5 million students strong. We represent a large umbrella of organisation of students. We have the United States, the students. We have the American Medical Student Association. We have the Canadian Federation of Students. Basically we work with large student organisations and we facilitate their activities and their lobby efforts. All these groups have their own lobby days and we provide them with resources to help and we are also organizing our own lobby day this coming Monday and Tuesday where we will be lobbying as a coalition of students.
Next. Next. Okay. So our role is two fold. We educate the next generation of researchers about open access and we also advocate for open access policies at campus and national and international level. Next. Next slide, please. So basically our activities are as I said student lobby themselves and we have our lobby days where we lobby together and we have had two summits so far this year. One of our the director of our coalition actually just returned from Athens where he was participating in the European Student Medical Association. So we are involved internationally as well and we are internationally expanding. So if you know of student groups in your countries please send them my way because we would love to have new members sign on and participate in our coalition. Finally what I would like to say is that one of the big events that open access has is Open Access Week. And Open Access Week 2010 this year will be October the 18th through the 24th. And the Web site is openaccessweek.org and I really encourage you to go to this Web site and to sign on and participate. Because thus far there is 69 countries as of today signed up to participate. So if you are a librarian, a student, a researcher please, please go check out this Web site. And finally for students specifically we have SPARC awards for students to talk about their open access narrative and make a video about it. It can be a techy savvy video. It is sparcawards.org. We love to have submissions from our international community. So thank you so much and this is my contact information and I am going to turn this over to the moderator.
>> STUART HAMILTON: Thank you very much. Does anybody have any immediate questions for Julia following her presentation? If that's the case I think we will come back to revisit some of these very interesting themes. And we will move on to another short podcast from John Wilbanks. We have heard about open educational resources, open standards, open access. We will hear about John Wilbanks following a presentation from my colleague on my left, Emilija and she is going to talk about some very interesting examples from near Lithuania, the Lithuania experience, the open web and the policy recommendation that have resulted. Emilija, over to you.
>> EMILIJA BANIONYTE: Thank you, Stuart. Do you hear me? I want this mic closer. Stuart introduced me as the director of library. That's my main job but I also have another responsibility at the Lithuanian Research Library Consortium. I am the President of this consortium which is the NGO of 47 members in Lithuania. We have as members all our academic institutions, all our universities. Also the National Library, the Academy of Sciences Library and special libraries. And we have responsibility mainly to negotiate licenses for these libraries but not only for these libraries but also for public libraries. And I find this very important because through public libraries we are providing access to the information not only to the research community but also to the wider public. While being mainly active in negotiated licenses, we are also active in programmes as open access intellectual property and, of course, we are providing lots of training. We are very proud of being members of EIFL and via EIFL we are getting much, much better positions to the licenses we are signing and also we have possibility to work in the international community and to share our knowledge and to get knowledge from our international colleagues.
So why are we interested in open access? First of all, because we are interested in information. As information is not for free, so we had a research done a couple of years ago at our biggest university here in Lithuania, the Lithuanian University and the findings of this research showed that about 50 percent of the research articles that are written by the teachers and professors of this university are not available to the members of the university itself because the university does not have licenses to those electronic journals, proprietary journals in which those articles were published. This is a scandal how the research results cannot be accessed for the students and for the local community. Of course, we had to do something and what we have already done. So we started with awareness raising and each year starting with 2005 we are organizing seminars, workshops. I am being shown that somebody doesn't hear me. I have to swallow the mic. We started with awareness raising and we are organizing workshops and seminars each year. Very actively we are using Open Access Day and Open Access Week.
I have to confess at the very beginning when we started doing these seminars lots of people who were coming to our workshops lots of researchers they did not understand what we were talking about. But now these things are being discussed on the governmental level and not only being discussed but actions are being taken. So we started with we had to show something, what we can do ourselves and we librarians started compiling institutional repositories and we started with the database or institutional repository of electronic thesis and dissertations. This is the biggest institutional repository that we have or the ones that have most information in it. It has about 15,000 thesis and dissertations and starting with this institutional repository now we moved in to the national wide institutional repository called eLABa. We are collecting not only thesis and dissertations, we are collecting journal articles and electronic books, proceedings, working papers and empirical data. So far not everyone is participating in eLABa but there are institutions which are submitting more materials and there are institutions which do not submit anything.
So that depends on us how to work it so that everybody would understand the importance of this repository and deposit more material. And one of the things that we were working hard was to get is was to get the mandate to deposit materials. And it took several years for us to work on it. And we got now we have got a mandate which is Article 45 in the laws of science and studies on the Republic of Lithuania which was passed last year in April, 2009 and I want to quote this article which says "In order to guarantee the quality, transparency of the scientific research and to stimulate scientific advancement carried out utlising funds, all the results of the scientific activity carried out in the state science and study institutions must be made public via the Internet and by other means if this is in agreement with laws regulating intellectual property and protection of the commercial, state or work related secrets. Results of scientific activity carried out on non Governmental institutions of science and studies using state budget funds must be made public via the Internet and by other mens if this is in agreement with laws regulating intellectual property and protection of the commercial or state secret." We have the law but we don't have the regulation of how to implement this law.
Now those who want to follow the law but the ones who do not we have no mechanism how to punish them. What to do with those who are not following the law. There is still work to be done. How to implement the law in order to have it sort of workable. What we have learned that the training is important and it takes time for people to understand how open access is important for our everyday life. And policy is very important and what is written is written. And it is obligatory for the community and libraries can help in this work and, of course, we can't work alone. Libraries had started this work in Lithuania but we as librarians are only one stakeholder and we are lots of others. And we need to find enthusiasts who are working and show the results that works. And also it is very important to find influential policy papers because sometimes the person who is speaking to the Government is very important, who is saying the word. And if we have those influential people working together than we can have results. Thank you for the attention.
>> STUART HAMILTON: Thank you very much, Emilija. We have had more people log on remotely and we are about to go in to a period of discussion now that we have heard from all our speakers. And we are lucky enough to have Indrid. Has asked to say a few words on what UNESCO is carrying out on this area. So Indrid.
>> Thank you for this opportunity. I would like to first comment to the organisors of this panel because it focuses on very critical issues relating to expanding knowledge and information. I also greatly appreciated all the presentations which although touching on various aspects of access were very complimentary. UNESCO has embarked on a very significant new initiative which we call the Open Suite Strategy which is an effort or attempt by to consolidate what we have been doing in bits and pieces over the years and in line with what all of you are also trying to achieve. The Open Suite Strategy essentially consists of three core activities. The first one is open educational resources where we are now building a platform where we are going to put all our resources, publications, documents, curricula, et cetera, online in open document format, of course. Where people can access these documents, create flexibility and also provide us with the opportunity of seeing how these materials are being used and reused and built.
The second initiative which we which is part of the Open Suite Strategy which is open access to scientific information and our member states have requested to undertake a global mapping in order to advise the member states on what policies to formulate, how to go about enhancing open access within the countries and this will lead to the creation of a UNESCO platform where all open access repositories around the world with be linked and connected. We have in 2001 launched the free and open source software portal and this portal was extremely popular. The free and open source software community was very actively engaged in this portal but we feel now the need to redo, update, upgrade the portal and specifically with a strategy that helps the free and open software opportunity to take ownership of the portal.
UNESCO is going to be providing the platform and all those who are interested and involved in the free and open source movement can then come on board. We are in talks with Mozilla and lots of other foundations, open source foundations. And so this also I think will be an initiative where all of you in your various capacities and through your executions can help enhance what UNESCO one of UNESCO keys what we call lines of action which is fostering universal access to information knowledge. Thank you.
>> STUART HAMILTON: Thank you very much. So we will now move forward in to a period of discussion. I already have some comments lined up. We have heard from our speakers and background on the open web and we talked about each educational resources and standards and interesting advocacy models. And we have also talked about library consortium and how we can come together to make open access more useful for our users. I would like to open the discussion to those of you in the room now and we will start with our colleague Pranesh Prakash from the Centre for Internet and Society and after that we will look around the room and see who would like to speak.
>> PRANESH PRAKASH: Thank you very much. I would like to draw attention to the people in the room to a few projects in India on both the areas of open science as well as open educational resources and open access. Now some of you might not have heard of the open source drug discovery project which is being undertaken by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research in India. Now this is a project that's currently aiming at mapping out the genome of microbacterium tuberculosis. It is a disease that kills almost 2 million people worldwide and a large number of that is in India. And because it affects poorer people and underdeveloped countries not much money is for research. The project aims to rectify they have gotten along of providing that mapping up around three years. And actually less than three years. And it has more than 3,000 people signed up from more than 74 different countries. And I was in a room where a presentation was being made about the open source drug discovery project and we were asking for some sort of comparison to other things. And we were told there is actually nothing that no other similar project that we can compare it to because in a much shorter time period we have achieved so much more and that I think is something that we really have to consider.
Also I would like to point out that in India the National Knowledge Commission which advises the Government has published recommendations asking for adoption and increasing the amount of open educational resources and open access in India. We have a large programme called National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning which publishes which is a project that involves all the Indian students of technology and of science and it is funded by the Government. It is putting up material online, on Youtube and has more than 13 million views so far and so and the important thing in such a project is not just the benefit for students but one commentator on Youtube actually talks about it being a boom for teachers in India to learn from a premiere institute. You get to learn from those professors and the National Institute of Open Schooling which is the world's largest open schooling system is now going in for open educational resources and they have held a couple of meetings in this regard of how best to move forward in that direction.
The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research which consists of around 39 labs has actually published a memo asking all its labs to publish that all research papers be published and made available through open access. The open access movement in India has been going much slower than we like but progress is definitely being made. And I wanted to point that out each the point about open source drug discovery which I haven't quite seen anywhere else in the world.
>> STUART HAMILTON: Thank you very much, Pranesh. So I would like to open it to the rest of you in the room to take advantage of our panelists' expertise or make comments on the presentations that you have heard or perhaps tell of some of your own experiences in terms of open access. I know we have one comment from one of our remote participants. So perhaps, Theresa, you could share that with us now.
>> THERESA: We now have remote participants also joining from us Ethiopia and from Malawi. There is a comment from Mr. Cadawan, who is a librarian at the college of nursing and he has a comment on the open access and the importance of open access to a developing country like Malawi where research is largely published in international commercial journals and a paper view of about 35 U.S. dollars per article is required. This is not affordable for researchers, lecturers and students in a country where people live on less than 1 U.S. dollar per day. They are planning to build an open access national institutional repository. Thank you.
>> STUART HAMILTON: Thanks for that comment.
>> ANDRIUS KRISCAINAS: A question to the panelist, if you were to summarize what the let's say the five most important decisions you would like to be made at a national Government level and at a global level, what would they be? And in response to the global level question, which institution should be making what decisions?
>> EDDAN KATZ: In the education space I mentioned on the national level ministers of education committing to the advancement of open educational resources and the procurement for schools of open educational resources to advance that, make that ecosystem central to educational resources on the international stage and I think as I mentioned open educational resources has its own ecosystem sometimes conflicts with copyrighted material that is protected and impedes the educational process. And I think the World Intellectual Property Organisation needs to advance the treaty on exceptions and limitations to copyright. There is a proposal that has been put on the table by Africa which places educational as central. I can think of other examples but those two in regards to education are important policy statements and treaties and agreements that should be advanced.
>> Just a follow up question on that. That treaty, so would that apply to copyright of materials produced inside developing countries as well as materials produced in developed countries?
>> EDDAN KATZ: Yes. The need for such a norm setting treaty at the World Intellectual Property Organisation is because there is lack of the exceptions and the limitations, the flexibility within the copyright system that enables educational uses, sharing of materials, displaying them in ways that aren't necessarily anticipated by the publisher. Though those exceptions do exist in many developed countries they don't exist in developing countries, the exceptions and limitations are necessary in order to create the balance. There are others who could speak very much more capably about the exceptions and limitations in regards to libraries. Many of them here who are advancing those norm setting principles that so that libraries are able to make work available to the public and to educators and students and researchers in developing countries and that would be something that should be advanced as well.
>> JULIA MORTYAKOVA: On the national level I would like U.S. to pass Congress and made a law. And at a local level I would like institutions to have more institutional repositories at universities. I think it is important to talk about the individual level professors and researchers and students and I think it is important to read open access journals and to publish open access and to set precedent how this is a great way to promote science and research and to promote the cause of humanity.
>> IRYNA KUCHMA: In my other in open access I would recommend national open access policies mandating open access funded with public money.
>> EMILIJA BANIONYTE: I agree that mandates are important. Some researches will publish their works in open access but there should some system of bonuses that researchers receive in the evaluation of their work because now it is the minority of the researchers who take the burden of depositing their works. So not all of them have this understanding of sharing. And some of them are so busy that we librarians have to help them but if they will have some evaluation system they will give some get some bonuses if they will deposit their works I think that will work. And, of course, I agree about exceptions and limitations that they should be mandatory internationally because now there is a big, big variety in this field.
>> STUART HAMILTON: We have a comment from the gentleman on the left.
>> My name is Mohammed Abraham. I am from Africa but please work out which country. You understand why the comments I will make although not joined they will make sense. I grew up in a town where there were a lot of libraries, U.S. library, Chinese library and Korean library and I learned quite a bit and I moved and I work in then I fly back this year and I work in Somalia. Sorry, I told you where I am from. I work in Somalia. I am helping the Government. So as I fly back to Somalia via Dubai and I fly via Emirates, I go to Irgasa, a city of 1.5 million. There is only a one room library. The books are so old you are worried to open them. The calendar on the wall is a few years old.
Here are the comments that I want to share with you. I enjoyed the talk. I know some stuff we are talking here. One of the things we want to do is get, for example, newspapers and magazines from some of the developed countries. When I go to a book shop I can read any magazine I want while having coffee for free. But after that edition finishes some of those book shops, you know what they do with the outdated magazines and newspapers? They actually burn them. They don't tip them and don't give them away. They are destroyed. The reason is for economic reasons. They have don't want them to get for free. We are trying to get those old newspapers and magazines and send them back home. Maybe you can help.
The issue about the online access, again I am working with IT students. Here is the problem, if I am in Somalia and Kenya or anywhere else which I was for the last few months, it is all very well. You can actually access a lot of stuff online. But what you don't realise is actually there is a cost involved. Because most of this content is outside Africa and to access it someone is to pay. The average person says it is free. And somewhere along the line there is a cost. How about getting the content itself to Africa and making it available locally so that people don't have to pay for very expensive connectivity and so on? Those are some of the ideas that I want to share with you. Thank you very much.
>> STUART HAMILTON: Thank you for that comment. I would be happy to talk to you afterwards perhaps about what my organisation can do regarding some of the libraries in Africa on print materials. Can I look out to the floor? Do I have a comment from Pranesh again?
>> PRANESH PRAKASH: Just two concerns I wanted to raise apart from copyright. There is also the issue of patrons that we have to keep in mind when we are talking about something like open science. Because the OSDD has had to come up with a specific patent policy saying how those contribute towards this project won't be certain patents and how what's finally come out comes out. That first, that itself is not patentable. People can take that information and build patents on that that they are fine with. But the process itself shouldn't be hindered due to patents and there is a growing tendency especially in developing countries to go in for legislations on the model of IDL Act of the U.S. which requires that which requires researchers doing publicly funded research to seek patents on the output of that research. And now we have pushed through a specific exception, specifically for projects of the sort, of open source discovery in the legislation that's proposed in India, but I think this is a larger problem that people across the world should be weary of and because it directly impedes this, and it is strange on the one hand something like Sar before we pointed them out to all of them didn't have a problem with the equivalent in India whereas they are pushing for open source drug discovery.
>> EDDAN KATZ: I just wanted to make a comment related to the experience you shared in Somalia. I think it is important to note in the flows of knowledge it makes it a lot more possible for bidirectional exchanges of knowledge. I think it is very important for, you know, we are talking about developed and developing countries. I think a greater knowledge of what takes place and what goes on in developing countries from people in developed countries is quite important when you see maps of information flows. It is tragically unidirectional, and I think that one thing that's very promising and important to recognize is that it needs to flow in all directions. And I appreciate the preservation of knowledge that, you wouldn't have access to and the open knowledge web makes that available.
>> Can I make a comment on that as well? From the library's perspective my organisation has recently produced an online database with country reports from 122 countries which covers some of these issues about level of information accessing libraries there. You can find that at www.fll world report.org about the state of information there.
>> I just want to come back again, I am sorry, the issue about stats and reports, sometimes we have to be very careful to read them seriously. And I made this comment a couple of times before and I will repeat again. For example, the country I just mentioned, my country, the level of communication access, you get the cheapest communication. Probably faster. Why is it so? Because on the other hand Somalia is the we beat Afghanistan. How can you have a situation where there is no functioning Government for 20 years can have the best telecommunication? We need to be careful when we look at the development. Here you have a country where you can get the best mobile 3G, 4G. You name it. When you go to, Mogadishu I call my friends to call me it is 50 cents a call. So we have to be careful with all this millennium goals and stats and really analyze them. What does it mean that this country is No. 1 in telecommunication.
>> STUART HAMILTON: Thank you. I understand that Theresa first has comments from some remote participants and then we will come over.
>> THERESA: Yes. We have a quite an active discussions going on amongst the remote participants and they have also been posting links on some of the topics that we have been talking about today and we will save this chat. And if any of you would like to get a copy of the chat and of the links that are being quoted we will be glad to send those to you. Just send us your e mail address. So the links have been provided by Eddan Katz, by John Wilbanks, also by Abel Cain from UNESCO who is also participating remotely. Some of the comments from the participants, from Abel Cain says that African institutions can look to the setup of silos for setting up open access repositories. And he gives the link here and identifying critical success factors for setting up dynamic and viable open educational resources and open access repositories.
And finally sustainable capacity building is key. And Condowai adds to that and says that developing countries like Malawi to move out of positivity trap there is a need to improve access to research done within the country. Open access, open educational resources are critical to widening access to tertiary education. Finally John Wilbanks who was one of our speakers has given four points or four criteria. So the first is open access to foster open access. Open access to publicly funded scientific research made by funders.
No. 2 is a commitment to the public domain status for publicly funded data. No. 3 to begin tracking and rewarding, sharing via citations to open articles, datasets, materials and tools. And No. 4 increased funding for library resources, new training for librarians to support data. And then finally he gives an example of a solution. He gives a reference to an URL to a solution in the WC W3C policy where the open standards community has encountered again a patent problem and a good solution is from the W3C community. Shall we say if anybody is interested in this I can circulate it? Yep. I can come around and collect business cards. Or I can take your e mail address to give you some of these really rich links that we are seeing on the remote from the remote participants. Thank you.
>> STUART HAMILTON: Thank you and Anet, did you have comment?
>> You can also put it in the workshop report which will go on the IGF Web site. I wanted to my organisation released a report last year that was on access to knowledge and might still be copies at our booth. Stuart contributed to that. And that really is I think as Abel said there is a need for capacity building but not just for librarians. There was quite a lot of hype about creative comments and open source let's say five years ago and then there is an uptick. That they have made people aware. And it is okay. They can now just carry on. But they don't have to invest a lot in capacity building and awareness raising and that's really true. South Africa there is good policy, very activist about copyright issues. Our Human Science Research Council has been publishing comments for awhile but the majority of NGOs don't know about policies. It is not that they are really scared. They just don't so I think spreading out and widening this capacity building to individual researchers, academics, NGOs, anyone who is producing content that could be of the public interest is really, really important.
>> Just one observation, as many of you pointed out libraries play a crucial role in this sort of making research material, educational material accessible. What I have noticed particularly where I come from (Off microphone). They are so afraid to get in to conflict with law that they don't even explore the possibilities they have. And I have been wondering how libraries who principally sympathize with the idea to circulate information and make the stuff available, how they can be supported in a way that they sort of start digitalizing or get licensing for digitalizing material sort of to make their material available. They do I think need support from local NGOs but also from the user communities who would benefit from that.
>> EDDAN KATZ: I am hosting a link to a copyright for librarians project which Theresa was there was an EIFL project that I think is very relevant to that question. I am going to post a link on the chat and that is sort of a very full and comprehensive multi module guide that sort of gives librarians more information and encourages them to be less conservative about giving out the information.
>> STUART HAMILTON: And I would like to point that EIFL is engaged in library associations to better understand how to better advocate for copyright changes. Theresa?
>> THERESA: If I can make a quick comment to that. I think it is so true and we have these great chill factors where people are afraid and all they hear about is enforcement and criminalization. What we are trying to do in the copyright programme in EIFL to provide training and awareness training for librarians not to make them scared of copyright but to empower them to what they can do as well as what they cannot do. And if you cannot do something that you need to do that is part of job and mission and your role then you advocate to change the law. So I think this phrase we hear information is power. So if you know what it is that your mission is and your role and if you are confident that you have a public interest and then you have the knowledge as to what you can do I think it is very important and that's why we developed this course.
>> Just a quick comment about libraries and copyrights in print, environment libraries basically served users and readers in digital environment libraries serve (off microphone). It is now a part of library services to and understand all that copyright in digital environment and recommend what would be the best option if they want to secure some rights. Just a brief comment.
>> STUART HAMILTON: I think we had a comment from a colleague there.
>> Hi, I am Abdullai from Thailand. Yeah, we how you say so in terms of open knowledge, we already talk about open standards, the license of the content, right. Which yeah, very relevant say in the case of if it is open data, if the encoding is correct, if the standard is open enough the mission can read that's okay. But in the case of humans to read we still need to have a corrector and in the computer we still need to phones. In the case of many developing countries which unfortunately them use Roman scripts correctors. That's still a problem of the license of the fund as well. That's an effort to publish a document, research articles and whatsoever in to a like open access. But still it doesn't have an appropriate enough funds to embed it in the document. They are not allowed to embed some certain funds to the document. And the one that's freely available as an open source or the free funds sometimes it is not good enough. So I think the efforts and the subpart should go to the organisations who put a lot of efforts on the open funds projects and there are several organisations doing things like that as well. So I mean in total this is kind of like yeah, concern should be raised as well to make it like all inclusive. Thanks.
>> Thanks for the comment. Sir and I would like to just quickly answer that luckily in Thailand there are already institutional repositories that build in Thailand. So I am sure they support local scripts and it is like national science and technology development agency, number of universities, so it is I think we should all work to set up local repositories in our countries because we are like really the best or we know all the locals needs and we know the problems and how to address them.
>> Actually I raise not for my country. We already have them. But in the case of like Cambodia and many minority languages that actually international start working on those projects already but it is kind of like in the recent year they are not well supported yet. So that's a comment. Thanks.
>> STUART HAMILTON: Our colleague from UNESCO has just left us but I wonder if this might be something that the UNESCO future projects might table because I know (Off microphone) in character recognition different languages, for example, the digitalization. That might be worth taking up with UNESCO for some of the smaller languages and different funds. Might I ask if there is further comments for our panelists. We have them here and we have their expertise and we have your own expertise that we are still willing to hear.
>> THERESA: We have two comments from our remote participants. First one is from Fiona Bradley who works for the International Library Association and Fiona says that librarians are often the front line for open resource. As liaison librarians working directly with faculty and she agrees with the speakers that support training for that role and many organisations are working to provide this framework.
And the second comment comes from the hub in Armenia who seconds and agrees with having quality open fonts for scripts that was mentioned by our colleague and John Wilbanks has been sending more links to important directories of open access repositories and open access journals and open software for publishing in open access journals. Thank you.
>> STUART HAMILTON: A comment from our colleague Ben.
>> BEN AKOH: Thanks. My name is Ben Akoh. It is just a comment that perhaps just a suggestion to the EIFL and the open access community, that perhaps they need to consider the national and regional structures for Internet Governance discuss as a way of entrenching some of the values that we talked about here today within those policy bases. There seems to be separation at national and regional levels and it makes a lot of sense to the impact for libraries and for education, our research institution is fundamentally access or rather access is perhaps the medium by which we can connect to most of the resources that you are talking about. If we don't address those especially from a developing country perspective we will face some of the challenges that we have been talking about. It does make sense to explore those policy spaces to entrench some of the recommendations and suggestions that we have been talking about today.
>> STUART HAMILTON: Thank you very much, Ben. Are there any further comments from the floor? In that case I think I would like to thank you all very much for coming along to this session. I know that our team have been taking notes and that a lot of the information that we have shared with each other will be made available in the workshop reports. I am also sure that the eifl.net Web site will be carrying information about this session and I would like to thank you eifl.net and Brazil OER for organizing this workshop this morning and thank you again for coming again. And I hope you can monitor the libraries working in the open access environment through the projects and the results that we hope to bring to you. Thank you very much.