The mission of UNESCO, which was founded in 1945, is to “contribute to the
building of peace, the eradication of poverty, sustainable development and
intercultural dialogue through education, the sciences, culture, communication
and information.”
 |
| Indrajit Banerjee |
An important plank
in that mission is a commitment to help build inclusive and equitable knowledge
societies. We should not be surprised, therefore, that UNESCO supports the Open
Access movement, we should not be surprised that it was the first UN agency to adopt an OA policy, and we should not be surprised
that it now makes its own publications Open Access.
Today UNESCO’s
OA repository (OAR) provides free access to over 500 of its own books,
reports and articles in over 11 languages, and in recent years it has created a
number of OA portals, directories, knowledge banks and Open Access indicators.
In actual fact,
argues Indrajit Banerjee, a commitment to both openness and to science has been
implicit in everything UNESCO has done since it was founded in 1945. Immediately
after the Second World War, for instance, it was one of the chief architects of
the portion of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights aimed at safeguarding the rights of
researchers. Specifically, Article 27 of that declaration asserts that
everyone has the right to freely share scientific advancement and its benefits.
Subsequently,
in 1974, UNESCO proposed a set of special recommendations concerning the status
of science researchers; and in 1999 it organised a World Conference where a declaration on
science and the use of scientific knowledge was agreed.
UNESCO’s advocacy
for Open Access as such began shortly after the 2003 Budapest Open Access
Initiative (BOAI), where the term Open Access was
first adopted, and a definition of OA agreed. That year UNESCO had its first high-level
success in OA advocacy, when it successfully lobbied for universal access to
scientific information and knowledge to be included as one of the Action lines
(C3) of the World Summit on Information
Society (WSIS) process.
In 2009, UNESCO was requested
by its member states to draw up a strategy for Open Access, a strategy approved
at UNESCO’s 187th session in 2011. This contains a set of short,
medium and long-term action plans (to be achieved within set time frames) to
assist governments strengthen the processes for granting irrevocable rights of
access to copy, use, distribute, transmit and make derivate works of research outputs
in any format, within certain constraints.
The strategy
also stresses that UNESCO should place particular emphasis on making publicly-funded
scientific information (journal articles, conference papers and datasets of
various kinds) freely available.
As a global
organisation with 195
member states and 9 associate member states, much of UNESCO’s work takes
place at the level of national governments and regions. To that end it regularly
convenes high-level meetings in order to educate national governments about the
benefits of OA. It also commissions research, reports, and guides on OA (often
in partnership with other large organisations like the EU).
Given its broad
mission, UNESCO views Open Access not as an end in itself, but as one of a number
of important tools that can help achieve its wider objective. The toolkit includes
other free and open approaches like Open Data, Open Educational Resources, and Free
and Open Source Software, plus tools designed to facilitate and encourage
sharing such as Creative Commons licences.
Above all,
UNESCO believes that the success of OA depends on effective capacity building.
In the context of OA this implies facilitating “a set of activities to improve
awareness, knowledge, skills and processes relevant to the design, development
and maintenance of institutional and operational infrastructures and other
processes for implementing Open Access”.
And with its focus
on creating inclusive and equitable knowledge societies, UNESCO approaches Open
Access from the perspective of human rights and the eradication of poverty, and sees ICTs playing a vital role in achieving its objectives in these areas. Its two global
priorities currently are Africa
and gender equality. As such, it is determined to ensure that Open Access is
implemented in ways likely to help, rather than further marginalise, developing
nations, and in a gender neutral way.
In light of all
this, as the UN’s Millennium Development Goals give way to the Sustainable
Development Goals, UNESCO is keen to embed Open Access into the new goals, viewing OA as a vital
tool for achieving them.
Given its
international perspective, and its authority, UNESCO also believes that it is
ideally suited to oversee a global debate on Open Access, a debate that — in
light of the growing danger that Open Access could end up excluding rather than
including the developing world — is now pressing. To this end, UNESCO hopes to
organise the first international congress on OA.
To get a better
sense of UNESCO’s interest in, and work on, OA, and what it feels to be the key
issues going forward, I sent seven questions to the director of UNESCO’s Knowledge
Societies Division Indrajit Banerjee. The answers turned out to be admirably comprehensive,
so I list a few choice quotes from Banerjee’s answers below. I urge everyone to
read the full text.
UNESCO’s INTEREST AND ROLE IN OPEN ACCESS
·
The primary reason for UNESCO to be
involved in Open Access stems from the fact that the organization believes in
“Maintaining, increasing and diffusing knowledge by encouraging cooperation
among the nations in all branches of intellectual activities”.
·
UNESCO’s role in the global Open
Access movement is to foster OA at the highest possible level by continuing to
build on the pillar of universal access to information and knowledge to empower
local communities by bringing experts together and utilizing its global network
of regional and field offices, Institutes and Centres.
·
Guided by the organization’s
founding principle that universal access to information is the key to building
peace, sustainable economic development and intercultural dialogue, UNESCO must
continue to raise awareness, formulate policies and build capacities to promote
Openness in content, technology and processes, with particular emphasis on
scientific information.
·
In an era where the World Wide Web
plays an increasingly vital role in the intellectual development of societies,
information digitization has revolutionized the means by which we share
knowledge. As the ‘intellectual’ agency of the United Nations, UNESCO has a central
and critical role in encouraging the universal sharing of all forms of
knowledge in real time to build inclusive Knowledge Societies. This may be
through the classical form of dissemination, but more importantly by supporting
the Open Access movement enabled through the power of the Internet.
UNESCO’s VIEWS ON CURRENT ISSUES IN OPEN ACCESS
·
We understand that OA publications
are underrated because there is a lack of a policy that fully respects the
effort behind the publications. There is a serious concern about peer review
processes employed by OA journals.
·
There is an increasing concern that
although the OA mode of research publication is becoming increasingly popular,
it has not positively impacted the ability of researchers from developing
countries to publish their research works.
·
The policy issues surrounding OA,
adoption of policies (and/or mandates), implementation of policies (and/or
mandates), monitoring and evaluation of these policies (and/or mandates) still
need to be improved for most countries.
·
Furthermore, in the countries which
have formulated and established OA policies/mandates, they have not been able
to produce any solid evidence that OA is indeed having a positive impact on
knowledge production and dissemination in the country. As the contribution of
Open Access to the cost of research saved and the amount of knowledge gained
are still not properly evaluated, the condition of “lead-by-example” is
lacking.
·
We have also noted that within
countries, those who can make a difference still lack a good understanding of
OA and therefore do not fully support the OA movement, for fear of job loss and
negative impact on its publishing industry.
·
Development, sophistication or
understanding of OA is not evenly distributed, by geography or by subject.
There is a strong need for the cross-fertilization of ideas and conditions for
synergy to be properly discussed and explored in their entirety.
·
As the Global South catches up with
the North in terms of scientific output, for instance, it allows for greater
innovation in OA, and provides opportunities for developed countries to adopt
some of the less costly OA methods that have emerged in developing countries.
So, for instance, innovation in Latin America is enabling a lower APC cost
base. New models like this could benefit the North.
·
At the same time, innovative methods
from the North are being implemented in some developing countries. This
cross-fertilisation could be very productive and so we are documenting the
processes involved.
UNESCO’s PLANS FOR OPEN ACCESS
·
OA is central to UNESCO’s activities
in the future. It is part of our Open Solutions programme and we are convinced that Open Access should be an integral
agenda in any effort to create Knowledge Societies.
·
UNESCO must mobilize stakeholders to
organize regional consultations and explore the possibility of organizing the
first international congress on Open Access to scientific information and
research. This international congress should analyse the existing national and
international legal framework concerning Open Access and examine the necessity
for the elaboration of a new international instrument.
·
UNESCO must also play a role in
combining the context of Open Access within the broader understanding of
Openness and link it with Open Educational resources (OER); Open Training Platform (OTP) and Free and Open Source Software (FOSS).
·
UNESCO is also concerned about the
role that Open Access can play in realizing Post-2015 Development Goals. Dedicated research is currently on going to identify the potential of
Open Access within the broader context of SDGs.
·
As a specialized agency of the UN
system, UNESCO is playing its part in analyzing the concern about poverty (and
other human challenges) and is committed to making Open Access one of the
central supporting agendas to achieve the SDGs.
·
Out of 17 goals proposed for the
next SDGs, at least 10 goals need constant research inputs. Given that these
goals must be achieved globally, there is an absolute need for any restriction
to disseminate research outputs to be comprehensively addressed. So in the next
15 years, OA to research will play a fundamental role in supporting efforts to
achieve these goals.
·
UNESCO is working with its partners
to provide a closer look at the Impact Factor. While the existing bibliometric,
scientometric and altmetric approaches are robust, their upstream usage has
remained very limited.
·
The extent to which the Knowledge
Divide is narrowed, and to which we are able to create societies that are truly
Knowledge Societies, will determine the pace of development. OA has the
potential to lessen the existing knowledge divide. This gap goes beyond the
rifts in mere access to ICT. It refers to the gaps that exist across all the
four building blocks of Knowledge Societies, namely: Knowledge Creation;
Knowledge Preservation; Knowledge Dissemination; and Use of Knowledge.
·
Opening access to knowledge is thus
a fundamental part of the approach that can open and address the many jagged
facets of Sustainable Development. OA uses ICTs to increase and enhance
dissemination of scholarship. Sustainable Development and the creation of
Knowledge Societies therefore are two sides of the same coin.
·
The theme of inclusive Knowledge Societies continues to be at the heart of UNESCO’s work to fulfil the WSIS objectives. Inclusive Knowledge Societies are societies in which people
have ready access to information and communications resources, in languages and
formats that suit them, and the skills to interpret and make use of them. The
Organization’s future work will thus be to establish the context of OA within
the broader framework of inclusive Knowledge Societies. UNESCO will continue to pursue this objective vigorously through its own
programmes on OA as well as in partnership with other organizations and UN agencies.
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