Mission: • To inspire new activities and facilitate knowledge exchange between Nordic/Baltic • stakeholder, and to increase the international visibility of Nordic and Baltic policies and initiatives • To stress the importance of Open Access in the Nordic and Baltic countries and to describe both theoretical and best-practice models for financing, rights management and other fundamental issues. • To disseminate to both a Nordic/Baltic and an international readership information about successful initiatives and other activities in the Nordic and Baltic countries.

OPENNESS For all innovation efforts, there are quite important issues concerning openness, and the hazards of enclosures of science and the hoarding of knowledge. A number of academics writers, patent professionals and R&D experts have called attention to the potential risks that innovation inducement prizes might lead to less sharing of knowledge, as people position themselves to win prizes. But this risk should be seen in a broader context. It is also often pointed out that patents can discourage upstream research and downstream product development. Government grant programs that encourage the privatisation of publicly funded R&D (like the US Bayh-Dole Act) can also move things in the wrong direction. It turns out this whole important topic is complicated. One area to pay attention to are the “Bayh-Dole” issues relating to prizes. In many of the US government funded prizes, and in the early X-prize designs, all of the intellectual property rights go to the recipient of the prizes. In some non-medical cases in the US, the government is barred from asking for licenses to use the inventions that win the prizes — an even worse outcome than for patents developed under federal grants, which are subject to (rarely used [fn1]) royalty free government licenses, and march-in and access requirements. So one debate is about obtaining the right bundle of rights in patents or data from prize winners, and managing also the disclosures. After a series of workshops on medical innovation inducement prizes, proposals also emerged to include new “open source dividends,” which involve sharing of prize money to entities that openly share access to knowledge, materials and technology. The open source dividends were modeled in several of the 2008 Bolivia Barbados prize proposals, and have unfortunately been ignored by some of those who have commented on those proposals. There are also much more transformation proposals for funding open source medicine, including the proposals to introduce “competitive intermediaries” that have as t

Open Access to Literature from Funded Research By "open access" to this literature, we mean that it should be on the internet in digital form, with permission granted in advance to users to “read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of 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 other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.” Access to Research Tools from Funded Research By "access" to research tools, we mean that the materials necessary to replicate funded research - cell lines, model animals, DNA tools, reagents, and more, should be described in digital formats, made available under standard terms of use or contracts, with infrastructure or resources to fulfill requests to qualified scientists, and with full credit provided to the scientist who created the tools. Data from Funded Research in the Public Domain Research data, data sets, databases, and protocols should be in the public domain. This status ensures the ability to freely distribute, copy, re-format, and integrate data from research into new research, ensuring that as new technologies are developed that researchers can apply those technologies without legal barriers. Scientific traditions of citation, attribution, and acknowledgment should be cultivated in norms. Invest in Open Cyberinfrastructure Data without structure and annotation is a lost opportunity. Research data should flow into an open, public, and extensible infrastructure that supports its recombination and reconfiguration into computer models, its searchability by search engines, and its use by both scientists and the taxpaying public. This infrastructure should be treated as an essential public good....

Overall, our findings highlight a neglected cost of IP: reductions in the diversity of experimentation that follows from a single idea.

a quote from the autobiography of Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computer and designer of the Apple I and II computers. "It's funny, I think back on it now -- the Apple II would turn out to be one of the most successful products of all time. But we had no copyrights or patents at all back then. No secrets. We were just showing it to everybody." (p.195)

J. A. Evans's Report "Electronic publication and the narrowing of science and scholarship" (18 July, p. 395) suggests that (i) the average age of citations to scientific papers dropped over the years as more electronic papers became accessible and (ii) the citations are concentrated on a smaller proportion of papers and journals. Such conclusions are not warranted by Evans's data. To measure the evolution of the average (or median) age of the references contained in papers, one has to look at all the references in all published papers and observe the evolution of their age over time. As we have shown using Thomson Reuters's Web of Science data for the period 1900 to 2004 (for a total of 500 million references in 25 million papers), the average (and median) age of all references began to decrease in 1945 but has increased steadily since the mid-1960s. This trend is visible in all sciences, including the social sciences and the humanities (1, 2). The median age of references in fields of science and engineering moved from 4.5 years in 1955 to more than 7 years in 2004, and in medical sciences it increased from 4.5 to 5.5 during the same period (1). In fact, Evans's conclusions only reflect a transient phenomenon related to recent access to online publications and to the fact that the method used does not take into account time delays between citation year and publication year. Our data also show that in disciplines in which online access has been available the longest (such as nuclear physics and astrophysics), the age of references declines for a number of years in the 1990s but then increases from 2000 to 2007, the last available year of our data set. We have also measured the concentration of citations (and journals) by three different methods, including the one used by Evans. All three measures clearly show that concentration is in fact declining for papers as well as for journals (3). Although many factors affect citation practices, two things are clear: Researchers are increasingly relying on older science, and citations are increasingly dispersed across a larger proportion of papers and journals.