Dear All,
Please do not be alarmed by the Eurocratic gibberish that the
ever-attentive and helpful Dr. Miradon has brought to our attention.
It is standard bureaucratic superficiality, sloganeering and obtuseness.
It has no bearing whatsoever on Open Access, which is about *published
research*.
The nonsense at issue here, in contrast, is about things like patentable
findings and trade-secrets that one does *not* publish (because one
wants to reserve exploitation rights, etc.)
The "Research Ministers" have simply crossed two wires, conflated two
agendas (and will continue along their paths of confusion, no doubt).
We should focus on trying to clarify their thinking, rather than taking
their incoherent slogans at face value.
The way out of this conflation is to point out that OA is about
published research, that published research facilitates research
progress, that Open Access facilitates this facilitation, and that this
has nothing whatsoever to do with non-published findings and
trade-secrets for commercial exploitation -- other than that even secret
findings need to be built out of prior published research! So OA
for published research benefits it all.
Stevan Harnad
On Tue, 26 Jun 2007, N. Miradon wrote:
> Last Saturday, the European Union's Council of Presidents and Prime
> Ministers _welcomed_ <<the initiative for a European Charter for the use of
> intellectual property from public research institutions and universities
> (IP-Charter) to improve the knowledge transfer between research and industry
> and its contribution to the development of the European Research Area>> and
> _invited_ the Commission to <<present early in 2008 initiatives to follow up
> on the Green Paper on the European Research Area>> {1}(para 37).
>
> Then on Monday the Ministers of Research met in Luxembourg and {2}(page 11)
> _welcomed_ ... <<the Presidency's initiative in moving forward a process
> with a view to establishing a voluntary charter for the use of Intellectual
> Property from public research institutions>> (got it?) and _invited_ the
> Commission to develop ... <<a Recommendation to public authorities and
> guidance for stakeholders. This should promote European competitiveness by
> better exploitation of know-how and the prevention of unwanted outflow of
> know-how>> (sic).
>
> It looks as though heads of state on Saturday and ministers of research on
> Monday have all forgotten their earlier idea that <<The Union shall aim to
> strengthen its scientific and technological bases by achieving a European
> research area in which researchers, scientific knowledge and technology
> circulate freely>>{3} (page 116 of the (now abandoned) Treaty establishing a
> constitution for Europe, Section 9 Article III-248, para 1).
>
> Sadly
>
> N.Miradon
>
> {1}
> http://www.consilium.europa.eu/uedocs/cms_Data/docs/pressdata/en/ec/94932.pdf
> {2}
> http://www.consilium.europa.eu/uedocs/cms_Data/docs/pressdata/en/intm/94967.pdf
> {3} http://eur-lex.europa.eu/JOHtml.do?uri=OJ:C:2004:310:SOM:EN:HTML
>
Received on Tue Jun 26 2007 - 11:01:12 BST