ISCB Public Policy Statement on Open Access to Scientific and Technical Research Literature

The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) is dedicated to advancing human knowledge at the intersection of computation and life sciences. On behalf of the ISCB members, this public policy statement expresses strong support for open access, reuse, integration, and distillation of the publicly funded archival scientific and technical research literature, and for the infrastructure to achieve that goal. Knowledge is the fruit of the research endeavor, and the archival scientific and technical research literature is its practical expression and means of communication. Shared knowledge multiplies in utility because every new scientific discovery is built upon previous scientific knowledge. Access to knowledge is access to the power to solve new problems and make informed decisions. Free, open, public, online access to the archival scientific and technical research literature will empower citizens and scientists to solve more problems and make better, more informed decisions. Attribution to the original authors will maintain consistency and accountability within the knowledge base. Computational reuse, integration, and distillation of that literature will produce new and as yet unforeseen knowledge. We strongly encourage open software, data, and databases, issues that are not addressed here. A prior ISCB public policy statement on sharing software provides very clear support for open source/open access (http://www.iscb.org/iscb-policystatements/software_sharing). We support open database access, standards, and interoperability. We also recognize that databases are complex dynamic entities, with ongoing roles and needs that cannot be treated properly within this statement. In contrast, the publicly funded archival research literature, addressed here, is the static historical record of publicly funded research outcomes. ISCB supports many of the principles set forth in other open-access policies and statements, including the ‘‘Budapest Open Access Initiative,’’ the ‘‘Bethesda Declaration on Open Access Publishing,’’ the Bulletin of the World Health Organization ‘‘Equitable Access to Scientific and Technical Information for Health,’’ the US National Academies of Sciences report on ‘‘Sharing Publication-Related Data and Materials: Responsibilities of Authorship in the Life Sciences,’’ the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development ‘‘Principles and Guidelines for Access to Research Data from Public Funding,’’ and the ‘‘Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities.’’ Details on the documents mentioned here may be found in Text S1. Further background material is available in Text S2. The public policy statement (Box 1) put forward here builds upon these principles to elucidate in more detail the public policy position of ISCB and its members on this important issue in scientific dissemination.

The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) is dedicated to advancing human knowledge at the intersection of computation and life sciences. On behalf of the ISCB members, this public policy statement expresses strong support for open access, reuse, integration, and distillation of the publicly funded archival scientific and technical research literature, and for the infrastructure to achieve that goal.
Knowledge is the fruit of the research endeavor, and the archival scientific and technical research literature is its practical expression and means of communication. Shared knowledge multiplies in utility because every new scientific discovery is built upon previous scientific knowledge. Access to knowledge is access to the power to solve new problems and make informed decisions. Free, open, public, online access to the archival scientific and technical research literature will empower citizens and scientists to solve more problems and make better, more informed decisions. Attribution to the original authors will maintain consistency and accountability within the knowledge base. Computational reuse, integration, and distillation of that literature will produce new and as yet unforeseen knowledge.
We strongly encourage open software, data, and databases, issues that are not addressed here. A prior ISCB public policy statement on sharing software provides very clear support for open source/open access (http://www.iscb.org/iscb-policystatements/software_sharing). We support open database access, standards, and interoperability. We also recognize that databases are complex dynamic entities, with ongoing roles and needs that cannot be treated properly within this statement. In contrast, the publicly funded archival research literature, addressed here, is the static historical record of publicly funded research outcomes.
ISCB supports many of the principles set forth in other open-access policies and statements, including the ''Budapest Open Access Initiative,'' the ''Bethesda Declaration on Open Access Publishing,'' the Bulletin of the World Health Organization ''Equitable Access to Scientific and Technical Information for Health,'' the US National Academies of Sciences report on ''Sharing Publication-Related Data and Materials: Responsibilities of Authorship in the Life Sciences,'' the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development ''Principles and Guidelines for Access to Research Data from Public Funding,'' and the ''Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities.'' Details on the documents mentioned here may be found in Text S1. Further background material is available in Text S2.
The public policy statement (Box 1) put forward here builds upon these principles to elucidate in more detail the public policy position of ISCB and its members on this important issue in scientific dissemination.

Supporting Statements
(1) The possibilities latent in the digital information age make it essential to achieve open access, and computational reuse, integration, and distillation, of the publicly funded archival research literature.

Box 2. Example Scenario
An automated malaria Web site might access location-specific information from thousands of publicly funded malaria research articles daily, and then integrate that information into a free online interactive world map. Such a map might be annotated with up-to-date information about disease occurrences, drug resistance profiles, current best control practices, etc., as distilled from the research literature extracted for and attached to each local region. A hypothetical user might be a public health official in the developing world responsible for controlling a sudden malaria outbreak in a remote area. Such a Web site should encounter no barriers while performing this free, useful, and potentially essential public service.

Example Discussion
A search for ''malaria'' in the US NIH/NLM PubMed literature database yielded more than 55,000 hits (July 2010; http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/). The publicly funded portion of these 55,000 ''malaria'' hits should be freely available in bulk to this hypothetical malaria Web site, using technologies well suited to bulk tasks, for purposes of (i) the initial bulk literature download; (ii) regular updates; and (iii) intermittent bulk repeat downloads to reinitialize an improved knowledge base. The relevant copyright permissions should permit computationally recombining the publicly funded portion of these 55,000 texts into whatever final form is most useful and informative to the user.

Conclusion
Currently, scientific advancement is limited by article availability, access costs, copyright restrictions, document formats, bulk download limits, etc. All such barriers should be removed.
The publicly funded archival scientific and technical research literature represents a substantial investment by the public, governments, foundations, non-profit institutions, publishers, individuals, and others. We in the ISCB are committed to the continuous enhancement and leveraging of society's knowledge resources. One of our primary missions is the computational integration of individual pieces of knowledge from the research literature and databases, in ways that provide powerful new ideas and insights for next-stage research, for the benefit of the scientific community and society in general.
To achieve these public benefits, we strongly advocate free, open, public, online access to the publicly funded archival scientific and technical research literature, and the computational reuse, integration, and distillation of that literature into higher-order knowledge elements.
The example scenario shown in Box 2 illustrates an important public health benefit that could be achieved immediately: the opportunity to pursue useful knowledge-based innovations, by computational reuse, integration, and distillation of the publicly funded archival research literature, across many areas in biology and medicine.

Supporting Information
Text S1 Documents Mentioned in the Statement Text