The following are the outputs of the captioning taken during an IGF intervention. 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, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> ANA ELIZA DUARTE: Good morning. My name is Ana. I am from Brazil. NIC.br, that's the company that regulates the r in Brazil. Today we will start the network session that's called ‑‑ sorry. Advancing open science globally: Challenges and opportunities.
The first one to talk is Henrique Xavier who works with him. He holds a doctorate in physics from the University of San Paolo and was a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. In the United States, and he has a post‑Doc researcher at the university College of London, and currently, as I said, he serves as a researcher specializing in web sites at NIC.br. He is actively engaged in open science practice. So.
>> HENRIQUE XAVIER: , okay, thank you. I will start with a brief overview of open science, and I'll share some of my thoughts on the challenges, more from the practitioner point of view and then leave for the actual researchers on open science to talk more about it.
So open science in a short sentence would be to make ‑‑ make ‑‑ science process and the science products available for everybody, regardless of nationalities, institution, affiliations, levels of expertise and economic condition. And other stuff as gender and so on.
Though idea is with open science we can improve efficiency by sharing knowledge and resources. We can reduce costs as well. There is also ‑‑ it may be a way to improve reproducibility in science as you are ‑‑ allow people first to see the data you used and what the analysis in principle if you adopt the good practices in open science, allows you to see ‑‑ people to see the analysis you did.
So this should help with reproducibility as well.
It should also improve the social impact of science. For instance, during the COVID pandemic, there was a large increase in open access to publications due to the need of timely information regarding the pandemic.
And also, making a connection to points that have been discussed here in the forum, open science, for instance, in health, could be an important asset for fighting misinformation. So especially through one of its, let's say, channels, which is science ‑‑ citizen science and public outreach.
So UNESCO actually published a document, recommendation for open science, which was published in 2021 and was accepted by 192 countries. So I think that's a good landmark, time ‑‑ well, good event that happened, right?
And it describes what open science is and it separates in basically four topics, I'll emphasize three of them, which is the open science ‑‑ the open access itself, for instance, so everybody has access to scientific publications, scientific knowledge, training material and so on.
Also open access, you can also expand that to open access to data and also to the analysis made.
You also have a second part of open science which would be open infrastructure.
So both having infrastructure for sharing all this knowledge, like repositories and web journals, but also sharing the resources and infrastructure needed to perform science, right, to conduct science.
Coming from the Astro physics ‑‑ Astro physics field, there was one thing that I think serves as an example. Telescopes are nowadays very expensive machines, and they are usually paid by a conshort number of countries ‑‑ consortium of countries. Open time for the community as a whole, even if the country didn't contribute to the ‑‑ to that project.
So it's a way of sharing some of the ‑‑ at least part of the resources needed for doing research.
And a third part that I would like to emphasize is the citizen science, can ‑‑ has a few, let's say, ways that are implemented. So one of these ways is the crowd sourcing. So getting help from the public, from the general public to do science, also that you can use crowd funding for science, and public outreach is also something that is important. So making the science more intelligible and accessible to people who are not experts in the field.
Another point in you citizen science is about making amateur scientists and not necessarily professional ones to be able to contribute better to science.
And, of course, open science, I'm not sure if it would have been impossible, but certainly would be very difficult without the internet. So the internet actually enables and fully enables the creation of open science.
So I think that already raises some ‑‑ of course there are some regions that still needs infrastructure, but it seems to me, I also like to hear from the other speakers, and the audience, that the main challenges to open science are more social and political, because the technical part, apart from the access in certain regions of the world, it's basically solved, I guess.
Okay. So from the challenges, I would ‑‑ for me as a practitioner, I think the access to publications, although it's an old topic I guess, it's still an issue that should be addressed. The majority of scientific publications are still behind paywalls nowadays, Pap that might be a challenge, especially for countries that don't have as much funding to pay for the subscriptions.
Another thing that we could ‑‑ let's say IGF perspective, would be in my view to improve the participation of the private sector as a contributor to open science.
For instance, nowadays a lot of the data that is collected and a lot of the research, especially in AI, for instance, or data from social media, they are collected and conducted by private companies, and is not necessarily easy to access data from these platforms or have access to the AI models and data used to train them, and probably open science in this way could improve also all the questions we have been discussing here could help to solve many of the problems we have been discussing regarding AI.
And finally ‑‑ let me see.
Maybe open science also ‑‑ well, I'll leave it for the speakers to compliment, and I would like to ‑‑ I'll leave it ‑‑ I'll leave for Ana to conduct the next part of the talk. Okay.
>> ANA ELIZA DUARTE: Thank you, Henrique. The next to talk about the open science here is Mr. Kazuhiro Hayashi. He holds a master's degree in chemistry ‑‑ sorry. From the University of Tokyo, and the ‑‑ he is recognized is a prominent fug in the field of open science.
He has served as an expert member for various institutions, including UNESCO, G7 and OSED and additionally, he is ‑‑ he co‑foundered the Japan open science Summit. And currently he serves as a Director of The research, unity for data application at the national institute of science and technology policy in Japan. Please, Mr. Kazuhiro Hayashi.
>> KAZUHIRO HAYASHI: I'm Kazuhiro Hayashi from the national institute of science and technology policy in Japan. Our institution is kind of a think tank research institution for the government to provide evidence for the science technology policy.
And I'm supposed to be the expert on open science. Today I'd like to introduce current background of the open science from the viewpoint of Japan's open science policy.
Here is a cheat sheet of the kind of data transformation since 1990. From the transformation of scholarly journal with XML publishing, I was computer geek that developed the system. And this provides the society in Japan. After a while, the open access movement came in 2005, created open access, and at that time, the open access movement is still in early age. Some policy‑makers have been keen on that issue, and that ‑‑ to expand due to not only the open access, but also the sharing research data as openly as possible. After COVID‑19, we are entering the kind of reopenness of science. Citizen science as Henrique introduced., the society or blockchain scientific system is being launched recently.
So research question starting from the digitalization of journals and data transmission for society and the media, and it's changed to the ‑‑ it was changed to the data transformation for research output focusing on the data and the impacts. Now I'm keen on data transformation, research and communities and service and my final research question is I wish to know how science and society would be changed eventually.
And sorry. And this is my chart for the in 2014 to explain what is open science. Open science from the viewpoint of open access is, let's say, open access is just access to the article. But open science is sharing the research output and allow them to use it while opening research activities. That's the beauty of open science, and it includes some previous initiatives of data sharing, open source, citizen science. So the open science has a very ambiguous but kind of inclusive concept to change science society and science and society.
So ‑‑ here this is for UNESCO in 2019, before UNESCO's recommendation, I was at international Advisory Committee of UNESCO's open science recommendation, and by this chart, I would like to stress that the open access ‑‑ open science is a movement to transform science society and society science and society in global context driven by the advancement of ICT,self r especially thanks to the internet. We are entering from the publish or perish world to the share or perish world. We are still in transition stage because we are still based on the legacy print‑based framework, society framework or any other social system is still based on the printed page or something. Establish legacy.
So we are going into the kind of somewhat chaotic, transition stay to transform to the new order.
So for that purpose, this is my self‑introduction, I was ‑‑ a am a multi stakeholder involvement person, catalytic researcher who has been working to solve social problems in science using ICT since 1990 and has been encouraging the transformation to an open science paradigm, so‑called data transformation by engaging with various stakeholders. And
And I'm in the policy side now, as an expert member of the UNESCO, G7, OECD and cabinet office. I'm a member of the science council of Japan. It's very unique because kind of ‑‑ not really, but it's a kind of a different stakeholder.
But I am a bridging agent to ‑‑ between policy and academia too, let's say, to develop some open science policy implementation.
Those bridging activities have been based my real experience of the trans sector, practice‑based data we are raising. As a scientist, as a e‑journal or as a publishers with e‑journal or foresight with librarians and others, or any other research data sharing practice, research data alliance, I have a lot of things to discuss. Here I'm very happy to have a connection to the IGF to discuss this matter.
Finally, these activities are rather focusing on the open access of Publix and research data sharing by the policy development.
But here as I introduced at the beginning, we are entering a kind of a new transformation, let's say the citizen science, the center of science with blockchain, how do we enjoy this movement to implement for the future. That's all, thank you for your attention.
>> ANA ELIZA DUARTE: Thank you, Mr. Casablanca hero. Now I'll ‑‑ Kazuhiro. I'll call. Carolina Botero. She earned her doctorate and pursued her post‑doctoral research at the London school of economics and political science. With considerable expertise in ‑‑ she currently serves as a coordinator of the open science and citizen innovation laboratory at the Brazilian institute of information and science and technology. So please. Sarita.
>> SARITA ALBAGLI: Hello, thank you for the invitation to participate in this panel. I a pity I cannot be with you in person. I will present a set of topics and debates today about the open science movement. Especially from Latin America perspective.
The open science is an international movement and involves local and regional specific views and issues. I organized my presentation into five groups of questions or issues. The first question is which openness? This question refers to the very meaning and scope of the idea of opening science. The open science movement was initially driven by the open access movement for scientific publications since the last decade of the 0th century as a reaction of the high prices charged by some international commercial publishers.
This made it difficult to disseminate research results and therefore the advancement of science, especially that financed with public resources.
You it soon became clear access to scientific literature was not enough to expand the circulation of knowledge and its social appropriation.
Open science can today be understood as a movement of movements, that is, it is a process under construction which covers several fronts from open scientific publications and research data, open scientific views and infrastructure, open education and citizen science. Therefore, more than an umbrella term, open science requires the convergence or intersection of these various tracks.
Progressively ‑‑ sorry. The notion of openness, a pragmatic vision, increasing speed and quality towards a democratic vision or at least a combination of these two perspective. The pragmatic and the democratic ones.
This is especially ‑‑ this is especially relevant for countries in the global south and Latin America in particular.
The second question is what science? Open science for what? This question implies once again that what is at the stake ‑‑ is at stake is not only the quantitative dimension of openness, but also the type of science and knowledge that we need to produce.
Points out the dominant scientific paradigms have created obstacles to the recognition of order and more diverse scientific trajectories and types of knowledge that could give way to more sustainable development paths.
There is also a geopolitical dimension here. On the one hand the consequences of the present social environmental crisis are global, the entire world is under threat and therefore require articulated on a planetary scale.
On the other hand, the impacts of the crisis and the conditions to confront it are not equally distributed. Its causes and impacts are different and unequal and are felt especially in the most vulnerable regions and social groups.
The third question is open science for whom? Who counts? The open science challenge also involves the recognition and incorporation of other actors, other narratives as well as the contributions of both the peripheries of the global scenario and social groups from below. These lines of thought have started to make visible the world views and perspective of traditional peoples, vulnerable populations, social stigmatized groups and knowledge based on experience, the lay expertise.
Today this knowledge has been valued to face the present planetary crisis. The proposed promoted what we consider cognitive justice.
The science was included as part of the open science movement. In the UNESCO recent recommendations for a global strategy for open science, two of the four main strategic action yes, sir are oriented towards citizen science. Participation expands to the idea of co‑production of knowledge with more horizontal relationships between different actors and different experiences.
The very notion of citizenship is expanded and redefined to include the idea of scientific citizenship.
The full question is what counts? This question refers to the growing convergence regarding the need to reformulate the evaluation systems of scientific research and its institutions as a central requirement for the broad adoption and institutionalization of open and citizen science.
This includes criteria for recognizing, rewarding and evaluating researchers access to research funding and career progression criteria.
The 5th question under what conditions.
In a schematic way, two major perspective are contrasted here. That of open watching in which open science becomes a profitable business model for large, large private publishers moving away from its regional principles, and fair, open science, that is openness as a pronotter of other forms of governments, diversity and dialogue between knowledges and science.
In the first case, the conversion of open science into business model for large publishers, the charging of high article processing charge stands out. These new business models also include the verticallization offered by these same companies or other associated with them of services and tools for the discovery, extraction and analysis of academic data, which corresponds to an academic platformization.
The risk for Latin American countries is that open access transitions towards the centrally commercial model imposing on us the APC model at prices that are inviolable for our realities. In addition to the dependence on paid information search and retrieval services produced by the journals themselves.
There is also the risk of subordination of our academic communities to evaluation criterias and methodologies guided by parameters that are often foreign to our own interests and reality.
Open infrastructure is important here in addition to the adoption of open platforms, tools and standards and codes, also the adoption of open government systems and protocols ensuring controls by academic communities. Fair open science proposed some new agendas, such as open access to open Publix, including multilingualist and diversity, for the fair principles for open data findable, accessible and reusable to dote sovereignty and the care principles, authority to control responsibility.
Alternative mets to all the evaluation criteria. From intellectual properties to open license and the public domain. From open infrastructures to horizontal and community governance. From traditional citizen science to extreme citizen science and the great dialogue in science.
Thank you very much.
>> ANA ELIZA DUARTE: Thank you, Sarita. Now I'll ask Carolina Botero, she is the Director of Charisma foundation and service as Kay columnist for both el expectador. With a background in law, she holds a master's degree in international corporation law as well as in contract ‑‑ in trade and contract law. She's a member of the board of directors for creativity commons and of CSISAC. The civil society server group of the OECD. Please, Carolina.
>> CAROLINA BOTERO: Thank you very much and good evening. I decided to focus my talk on the challenges of intellectual property rights in the frame of open science, as I completely follow Sarita has already said for the Latin American countries in the ages of open science.
So I would like to remember that during the pandemic, well during 2021 the countries lived their very own drama and were not able to provide vaccines, some during many more months, the question was no longer how do we keep the current status quo. How can open science reduce harm. Why did we allow the collaboration to reduce the production of a vaccine not to be the rule for its deployment, but instead it turned into another way of increasing profits for a few.
This question continues to be the case because the truth is that not even the pandemic allowed us to change the power relations.
So analysis of open science and other open collaboration efforts show that flexibilities make ‑‑ favors innovation and creativity, allowing a faster pace of problem solving and adaptation to local realities. It is a great tool for collective intelligence.
Moreover, focusing an public health, the frustration that we now face on the fact we were not able to shift the power relationship, is because this situation is also lived by millions of people in the world that live diseases. The health emergencies we we had in the pandemic is the day‑to‑day. For those people open science is not new. For them, it is what experiments that are already under development for many of them, open science is the road to take because they will never be a market.
This is why the phrases for instance during the pandemic, when she said during the pandemic, when it is not enough to have one vaccine. There are already six. What you really need is to assure the actual vaccination for all. Among other things, state continues to think very extract value.
This kind of thinking should be now the rule, but it is not.
The point is, those words put state dilemma on the table and help me to makesome some points, first one, the first place to think science is the right of all, the basis for sustainable development is precisely to discuss open science. It is also to remind us that intellectual property is not the one that saves lives. This is the tool for extraction. From a public perspective, it is also the instrument that was had to be used for sharing. Concerns that if open science goes against intellectual property, are really concerns on how to preserve the current intellectual property regime.
It has always said also the most disruptive element of open science is that it has been developed with intellectual property regime, and it will continue to do so. Voluntarily open science are key to this process.
However, it is important to understand that open science requires also the pushing of public interest and this means that we need to change the objective position that the states have before the intellectual property. States need to look beyond well rooted intellectual property and need to seek public interest. Because of inequalities, state needs to seek values not only intellectual property right now. Again, in the words ‑‑ of Ma suo, as long as it controls knowledge, it cannot continue to have its focus on extracting valley lone, especially when the public investment Citi at stake.
Finally, I would like to recall here the UNESCO recommendations on open science that has already been mentioned a couple of times. To highlight that it needs to ‑‑ that the intellectual property regime needs to recognize the flexibility, because the protection is not enough.
Under the current discussion that continues about the patents and its role on the public health system, we are required to acknowledge and promote open science. We have to ‑‑ we have to deal with intellectual property regimes, not only in patents, also in copyright. It is necessary that the value extraction moodle model creates protection, but also to bring it to the flexibilities.
Recent work for instance at the American University conclude that fewer than 25 percent of countries have corporate systems that permit research key for health. It was the key at least to identify the ‑‑ and predict that the COVID pandemic.
These ‑‑ it is necessary also to understand that poorer countries have extensively developed the value extraction side of intellectual property, but on the other hand they have not included in their system the mechanism of flexibility. In recent research done by the alliance of open knowledge ‑‑ sorry of access to knowledge in Latin America, we found that there is not even one country in the region that includes the necessary exceptions and limitations for research. Even less, they will be able to use artificial intellectual, to develop science.
They are not complying even with the international standards. Science needs to be seen as a public good for stated higher purpose openness should be the rule.
Under this logic, not only intellectual property but other considerations such as privacy concerns, for instance, need to be pushed for ‑‑ to consider openness and ‑‑ as possible and to push for open as the most possible and close only as needed.
So the questions have dramatically changed after the pandemic, but we are still trapped with the same official answers. We need cochange and open science is one way. It needs to change with its rules and logics. Also the idea of exclusively protection for intellectual property regimes. Thank you very much.
>> ANA ELIZA DUARTE: Thank you, Carolina.
Now we have a question. It's my question.
For Mr. Kazuhiro. It is a personal question because I work with open data and I am interested in open science. I was wondering how does Japan handle to a Publix of scientific articles? Do you have any policy that encouraged publishing that open model.
>> KAZUHIRO HAYASHI: Thank you for your question. First of all, Japan has a recommendation of open access to publicly funded research, agreed open access route to make the final version upload on the institutional repository of the university. That's ‑‑ that's the policy development for the open access.
In addition to that. Based on that, collaboration on that G7 countries, we are developing international infrastructure for research data sharing for the future. Future, let's say, dissemination platform towards the open science paradigm. The idea to implement at current stage. So we are going back to the open access policy since ‑‑ and from 2025, we are going to mandate the immediate open access Publix by public funded research, and we now very active to implement that mandated policy to implement practically among stakeholders, Japan state and I should say that Japan's current publication state in another aspect that we have open access journal platform called Jstage that has over 3,000 journals, more than 2,000 honor societies in Japan. It's like ‑‑ (?) reality Japanese scientist is likely to publish to journals outside of Japan. That's a problem. We have some incentive models to transformation of dissemination of scholarly output.
>> ANA ELIZA DUARTE: Thank you so much for your answer.
Now I just noticed that I was rude. I should open to the audience to ask the question first, but I was so curious. It's open, if the audience has some questions, you can do it now.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: You're looking for open questions.
>> ANA ELIZA DUARTE: Yeah.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: I have just an incredible pile of questions. And I'm trying to put down lists of the desirable properties of an open science environment, what's the ecosystem look like? So some of the questions that we have to answer, I think are, first of all, discovery, how do I discover publications, experiments, databases, related to science. Google tries to contribute with Google Scholar but doesn't cover 100 percent of everything. We need to answer the question, how will scientific results be discovered. The second one has to do with after you've discovered them, will they have standardized formats so that the documents that ‑‑ the document the science and the databases that contain the information are manageable. Where will those standard formats come from. Some of you are familiar with something called Schema.org something set up by Google and others, in order to document the formats of the various data we might find.
Another thing we would be looking for in this desirable properties list is the design of the experiments themselves, we documented the experiments, the instruments that were used, calibration methods and so on. This is all aimed at reproducibility of the experiments.
A big problem is which software might have been used to analyze the results, is that software available and will it be available in the future? And how does it get paid for?
Unfortunately, open source software may not be the perfect solution either, because we all know that often it doesn't get adequate attention in terms of maintenance. To make matters worse, sometimes it has bugs that are exploitable and lead to vulnerabilities, potentially also leading to loss of integrity of the scientific data that you hope would be helpful and reproducing the experiments.
Then there's the really hard problem, who pays for all this? And how do we pay for it long enough that the science is useful, accessible over time. I won't go on and on, I could, but the point I want to make is, if we are trying to promote open science, I think we need to collectively answer a lot of these questions. The hardest one I think is still funding. Archive, for instance, is essentially a sponsored database, someone pays for that for all of our benefit. Is that the only successful model. I will suggest one or two others that might be of interest. One of them is the research data alliance which continues, as far as I know, another ‑‑ we talked a little bit in several of the presentations about open source ‑‑ I mean, open access methods where the parties who are publishing basically pay to make the information openly accessible. Once again, we have the problem that not everyone is in a position to pay for that kind of open access. So we need to find funding models that will work. We look for the beneficiaries of the open source and open science data, the private sector may benefit from that. We might turn to the private sector and ask for their help as well.
But you have to sell the model to them.
So I'll stop there. That may not be exactly a set of questions, but I do wonder if we documented answers to these things, could an output of the IGF include an essay called desirable properties of an open science system and then list what those properties are and then ask the question if we don't answer them, about how to achieve those properties. I'll stop there, but thank you.
>> ANA ELIZA DUARTE: Thank you. I think it's too adult to answer these questions.
>> HENRIQUE XAVIER: Well, I don't know anyone wants comments on Vint Cerf's comments.
>> KAZUHIRO HAYASHI: I would like to introduce the current station to implement the open science including the questions, so from my point of view, we use a kind of he bridgehead space. One is practical, but showed ‑‑ practical methodology vision. We mandated open access to the ‑‑ scholarly journals and it is now ‑‑ being associated with sharing the data of the publish publication. It is closely related to the incentive to share research data for researchers. Our current ecosystem is too robust to change it rapidly. So within the model of the scholarly ecosystem, based on the ‑‑ not print, journal articles, we encourage researchers to share their research data with open access article. That's a kind of Trager methodology strategy.
And on the contemporary, we are aiming a totally new ecosystem with research data sharing with, say, the European open science crowd is seeking a way to develop a platform for research data sharing, without journal publication system. Alternative to the journal publication or to the disseminated research output.
But to introduce in my talks, so it's very hard for them to incentivize to move to respect enjoy on the new platform.
So we are thinking a kind of intermediate methodology or strategy, and it includes the standardization of data format for dissemination, research data sharing or any other development of software for ‑‑ to make researchers comfortable ‑‑ research activities.
So it's kind of a pretty competitive situation, among even in the country or UNESCO ‑‑ UNESCO 193 countries. So we are ‑‑ let's say on the ‑‑ I really am astonished to be here to see how IGF is basic infrastructure for implementation of open science and why didn't we have any collaboration so far, but it's now a good time to seek a way, seek some dialogue first, to develop something different. To the current legacy scholarly communication system.
So.
>> VINT CERF: I had mentioned earlier, one possible outcome of an IGF event like this is this paper on desirable properties of an open science ecosystem, let me suggest another outcome, foundational underpinnings, open science ecosystem, and here we would be talking about the technical underpinnings, what standards need to be in place that we would all adhere to in order to make our data useable by other parties.
There might be some lessons here from early history, national research and education networks in the early days of the internet around the MD 1980s we started to see research agencies around the world funding the implementation of networks to link universities to each other on a global scale. The National Science Foundation in the U.S. had a program called the international connections program, where they paid for the connectivity between national research networks for a period of time. I don't know if they still do that. But that enabled a number of different computer‑based systems to be Interconnected around the world to share their research results.
There's another ‑‑ so that's one possibility to talk to the very ‑‑ invite the various research agencies to come to the IGF and talk about that.
There's another concept which has been very popular at Google, it's called data commons. Here certain kinds of data, certain kinds of statistical data can be ingested into a large scale, for all practical problems, billion row, billion columns spreadsheet.
The reason that's interesting, for that kind of statistical data, once it's all in place and the data ‑‑ the meaning of the data is incorporated in there, the Meta data, that you can use the system to generate charts and graphs and other things that ‑‑ can almost be done automatically. You could ask for certain kinds of plots of data, not all data falls into that category. The idea of creating a data commons for some kinds of data could be very attractive last point, there is a system which accumulates and try to the establish standards for space data, whether it's earth observation or astronomical observation, they incorporated something called AOIS, which is a standard for archive systems. And I've been promoting the idea not simply writing the standards, but also demonstrating intra‑operability among the archives and the reason that's important is that if for some reason the funding model breaks, then an archive could pick up the responsibility because of the data. These are things I would like to see groups like this document as output from the IGF, and I'm speaking with my Chairman of the leadership panel hat on. We need to demonstrate to legislators around the world, and especially ‑‑ that the IGF is producing actionable results. Not just discussing them, but producing things that we can use.
So this is a possible place for you to contribute to that argument.
>> ANA ELIZA DUARTE: Thank you. We have another two persons ‑‑ the speakers are hands up. Sosa Rita, please.
>> SARITA ALBAGLI: I think this issue, this topic is very important. It's the same question we have made about the climate emergency, it's a global issue, but different responsibilities. So looking from a different perspective, I think we paid a lot for a closed science, not only because of the high financial resources needed to access research results, most of which are financed with public resources but also because of the social, environmental and health impacts of not having free access to this knowledge. So if you think from a different perspective, it's much more cheaper to have open science than closed science.
>> ANA ELIZA DUARTE: And now Carolina.
>> CAROLINA BOTERO: Thank you. Yes, I was thinking that if we are moving to a science that is highly depending on data, there are also many power centers that need to be addressed. Just Luke mine, developing countries that are basically consumers of that rather than producers. Or are producers, but are producers for those countries from the north that are able to use them at bigger scale. And in order to try and shape these and allow also developing countries to be participants of a science that is based on data, we really need to also speak about the change on the legal framework for research, and this is something that is ‑‑ is highly dependent on the forms such as why ‑‑ there is a need to discuss these topics, and leverage, level the field for all the countries to be able to use data for research purposes.
And not just to ‑‑ I mean, listening to Vint Cerf. It's possible to do the infrastructure, but we need to do the analysis, what are the legal reforms that are needs. This is something done by countries in the north, but it is less an ability that countries in the south have developed. We need to do it. Thank you very much.
>> ANA ELIZA DUARTE: Thank you, Carolina.
Now we have another question. From Henrique.
>> HENRIQUE XAVIER: Sarita, I would like to know from your perspective, the issues that you raised, if we can think of any, let's say, call to action, which is one of the, let's say, goals and what VINT Cerf said, how to solve this problem. I was thinking for the problems that you raised, do you have any suggestions on paths to take and maybe do you think that global organizations such as UNESCO could play a role in this kind of thing or some other form of organization. Thank you.
Very vint cerf: I have a response to that question. What institutions might be helpful. UNESCO is one of them. The other is the international science council, if you haven't heard of them, council.science. Once again, they are a powerful platform, at least for articulating the importance of open science. So I would recommend collaboration with them as an example. I think you already know about them because you were nodding your heads. If we come back for a moment to the paper I was suggesting we consider writing. Desirable properties of an open ecosystem, what we would make ourselves do effectively is list the various properties we want and ask questions about how that can be achieved and even if we don't have answers, at least we have the questions.
And we could make that part of an agenda for achieving open science, by trying to solve each of those questions one by one or finding a place where those questions could be asked and dealt with.
I would love to see existence proofs, because sometimes that helps people understand that it's possible to achieve these objectives. So we build something and show that it works, then at least there isn't the question, is it possible to do this? Because you demonstrated the capability. Here's an example of something I think would be very useful. If you think about data preservation over a long period of time, which I am thinking here hundreds of years., the problem we end up with is that the software that was used to analyze the data or collect the data might not run 100 years from now on the operating machines of the day. What should we do about that? One possibility is to maintain an archive of the instructions to that architecture of the computers, old operating systems and old applications, maintain that database so you can run old software against the old data.
Another probability, of course, is transforming the data so it's still understandable in new incarnations of operating systems, and applications.
These are the kinds of things that you would want to have captured in this existence proofs, that things are possible. Carnegie Mellon has demonstrated you can run old software on simulated old machines.
>> HENRIQUE XAVIER: Sarita.
>> SARITA ALBAGLI: Okay. Yes, I think open science is a political movement, as you mentioned, Henrique, is not just first think technical ‑‑ we don't have really technical difficult problems. We have the tools to ‑‑ the solutions for these technical problems. I think the biggest problems or political, economic and so on. And, yes, UNESCO has been very important to document, and we have a very, very powerful Latin America movement from, from (?) Cielo, many powerful organizations that are doing a very powerful movement for different view, from what we call open science.
I think we are influencing they are worldwide debate. Even the coalition are changing their view from APC to diamonds, open access that ‑‑ you don't have to pay for publishing or for reading.
So I think social and political model is very important and have some results.
>> ANA ELIZA DUARTE: So thank you so much, everyone ‑‑ we have another question.
>> MICHEL NELSON: I'm Michel Nelson. I'm with Carnegie melon endowment for the international piece. I'm actually trained as a geophysicist, so back when big data was a few mega bites I was doing seismology research. But my current job, I do a lot on data policy around the world. Vint has mentioned a couple of organizations, the council.science and the research data alliance which I've been involved in. I'm curious what the panelists and others think are the groups that are doing the most innovative things to answer the questions that Vint laid out there? I work with the national academies of sciences in Washington, and we have a committee ‑‑ a national committee for co‑data which I'm on, and that's a wonderful global network, but I don't think it's realizing its potential. Part of it is funding, part of it is the very different needs of different disciplines, health data has to contend with private data protection loss, if you're doing agricultural research or designing sewage treatment plants, you don't have that problem.
So if people point to the international groups that you think are fostering the sharing of lessons learned, I would be very happy to hear that. Then I have a follow up question as well.
>> ANA ELIZA DUARTE: Thank you for the comment. Sadly, from me, I think the other participants, we have to end the networking session because we are starting another one soon. So I would ‑‑
>> MICHEL NELSON: I want to ask the other. It's another question, you can answer it in two words. I used to be a professor at Georgetown in the communications and technology program. One of the things that stands in the way of getting things done is when people have a bad idea in their head because they have a bad slogan. Everybody repeats. And I think you know what slogan I'm talking about. Data is the new oil.
I don't know how many policy‑makers have told me that as a way to justify data protection. So what is the answer? I argue that data is the new water. It flows across borders, much of it is stuck in the ice sheets we can't get at or in the deep ocean, some of it comes in special cans and is very valuable and analyzed and pure. Anybody have other ideas? I know it's not the new plutonium, that's the other slogan to avoid. So two‑word answer, what's the best analogy for data.
>> KAZUHIRO HAYASHI: Air ‑‑ like water. You use it.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: You filter it.
>> KAZUHIRO HAYASHI: It's inevitable.
>> HENRIQUE XAVIER: I agree, I agree. I would raise ‑‑ re‑raise the question I gave ‑‑ well, I pointed out in the beginning, which was, can we ‑‑ can the private sector contribute in the sense of providing the data that it collects, especially from my point of view that, as a web scientist, I'm interested in data like from social networks and web searches and stuff like that. It's not necessarily easy to get access to this kind of data or for data that was used for training AI, the big models from big companies, and the models itself. So yes, I think that water should ‑‑ we should have access to that water as well.
Thank you.
>> ANA ELIZA DUARTE: I'm sorry, I was rude again.
So now do you have another question or another comment?
So thank you, everyone, for being here, it was a rich conversation, rich Q&A, and that's it. Thank you for the audience too.
[ Applause ]