European Commission - Press release

Artificial intelligence: Commission outlines a European approach to boost investment and set ethical guidelines

Brussels, 25 April 2018

Today the European Commission is presenting a series of measures to put artificial intelligence (AI) at the service of Europeans and boost Europe's competitiveness in this field.

http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-18-3362_en.htm

European Open Science Cloud: first report now available

"By bolstering and interconnecting existing research infrastructure, the Commission plans to create a new European Open Science Cloud that will offer Europe's 1.7 million researchers and 70 million science and technology professionals a virtual environment to store, share and re-use their data across disciplines and borders. 

This will be underpinned by the European Data Infrastructure, deploying the high-bandwidth networks, large scale storage facilities and super-computer capacity necessary to effectively access and process large datasets stored in the cloud.”

More: http://ec.europa.eu/research/openscience/index.cfm

Council of the European Union calls for full open access to scientific research by 2020 - Creative Commons blog post

Taken from: https://blog.creativecommons.org/2016/05/27/council-european-union-calls-full-open-access-scientific-research-2020/?utm_content=buffer31966&utm_medium=social&utm_source=linkedin.com&utm_campaign=buffer
 

A few weeks ago we wrote about how the European Union is pushing ahead its support for open access to EU-funded scientific research and data. Today at the meeting of the Council of the European Union, the Council reinforced the commitment to making all scientific articles and data openly accessible and reusable by 2020. In its communication, the Council offered several conclusions on the transition towards an open science system:

• ACKNOWLEDGES that open science has the potential to increase the quality, impact and benefits of science and to accelerate advancement of knowledge by making it more reliable, more efficient and accurate, better understandable by society and responsive to societal challenges, and has the potential to enable growth and innovation through reuse of scientific results by all stakeholders at all levels of society, and ultimately contribute to growth and competitiveness of Europe;

• INVITES the Commission and the Member States to explore legal possibilities for measures in this respect and promote the use of licensing models, such as Creative Commons, for scientific publications and research data sets;

• WELCOMES open access to scientific publications as the option by default for publishing the results of publicly funded research;

• AGREES to further promote the mainstreaming of open access to scientific publications by continuing to support a transition to immediate open access as the default by 2020;

• ENCOURAGES the Member States, the Commission and stakeholders to set optimal reuse of research data as the point of departure, whilst recognising the needs for different access regimes because of Intellectual Property Rights, personal data protection and confidentiality, security concerns, as well as global economic competitiveness and other legitimate interests.

You can read the rest of the conclusions here. Crucially, the Council said that “open access to scientific publications” will be interpreted as being aligned to the definition laid out in the Budapest Open Access Initiative: free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.

Taken from:https://blog.creativecommons.org/2016/05/27/council-european-union-calls-full-open-access-scientific-research-2020/?utm_content=buffer31966&utm_medium=social&utm_source=linkedin.com&utm_campaign=buffer

European Commission's View on Increasing Access to Research Information

In this Communication to the European Parliament, the European Commission highlights the importance of increasing public access to research information:

"It is estimated that government investments of $3.8 billion in the Human Genome Project, a U.S. co-ordinated research endeavour including major European contributions, have had an economic impact worth $796 billion, created 310 000 jobs and launched the genome revolution."

https://ec.europa.eu/research/science-society/document_library/pdf_06/era-communication-towards-better-access-to-scientific-information_en.pdf

Data sharing reports from Europe

Two reports were recently released in Europe that might be of interest:

- The EU funded RECODE project released their final report. 

http://recodeproject.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/recode_guideline_en_web_version_full_FINAL.pdf

The project was funded to come up with Policy recommendations for open access to research data. They did this by investigating five disciplines in particular: physics, health, bioengineering, environment and archaeology.

The other report is a report from Knowledge Exchange, Sowing the seed: Incentives and motivations for sharing research data, a researcher's perspective

To investigate the incentives and motivations they approached researchers in arts and humanities, social sciences, biomedicine, chemistry and biology.

The report can be found at: 

http://www.knowledge-exchange.info/Default.aspx?ID=733