16.4: Access to Knowledge and Information Sharing

There is a growing awareness of the importance of access to knowledge and information and of the need to prevent commercial exploitation from making important knowledge the preserve of relatively few. An example of this was President Clinton’s decision to increase funding for the Human Genome Project to ensure that the sequences were not patented and limited to commercial use. When discussing access to knowledge it is useful to distinguish different kinds of knowledge or information.

Governments have detailed information about matters such as the health, safety and education of the population, trade figures, economic performance, spatial information and geodata. They collect this information for their own purposes and, in terms of the law of most countries, they have copyright in it. Such information, of course, is often also useful to researchers and commentators and to those thinking about investing in the country either to make a profit or to help development. There is, however, no single approach about whether and on what terms this information should be available.

In 2005 Brazil and Argentina proposed to the World Intellectual Property Organisation that the organization’s development agenda should discuss the possibility of a Treaty on Access to Knowledge (A2K). Much of the draft of the treaty deals with widening the scope of the exceptions to and limitations on the copyright holders’ rights. Part 5 is entitled “Expanding and enhancing the knowledge commons” and includes articles providing for access to publicly funded research and government information and a provision that government works should be in the public domain.

A category of government information to which some countries already allow access is material of a legal, judicial or political nature: legislation, case law, and parliamentary proceedings. In 2002 delegates from some Commonwealth countries produced a ‘Declaration on Free Access to Law’ that asserts, among other things that “(p)ublic legal information is digital common property and should be accessible to all on a non-profit basis and free of charge; …” Anyone who has followed the discussion in this chapter and reads the full declaration will realize that the declaration needs to go into more detail about creating derivative works and using the material commercially.

Tax exempt foundations and not-for-profit educational and research institutions also fund research that produces important information. According to the law in most countries, funders and employers can decide on what terms to release this information. It is understandable that researchers looking for funding may want to include a profit line from intellectual property in their research proposals. Educational institutions also like the idea of using the research done by their staff to produce what some call “third stream” income. It could also be seen as part of academic freedom that academics who work in educational and research institutions are entitled to a say in how their research is released. Access to knowledge advocates could argue that governments should consider whether institutions and funders that do this are really entitled to their tax-free status.

Creative Commons works through Science Commons to encourage the free flow of scientific information. One of the Science Commons projects has drafted model contracts for the transfer of biological material. Another project aims at publishing material that is important for biological research with an open licence. A third project aims at getting peer reviewed journals to publish with open licences and enlisting academics to publish only in journals that do this.