The delegates of about 20 member countries of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) came together in Zürich, Switzerland today (16.04.2021) to discuss the important topic of Open Access and Open Source publishing and the academia of 2021. The concept of Open access and open source publishing is to make scientific research and scientific papers publicly available.
Most participating delegations seem to agree upon the importance of this topic, as the current lack of regulation of such “self-made” publishers raises many concerns. One of the main concerns the delegates seemed to have, is the trustworthiness, or rather the lack thereof when it comes to such publications. Australia reminded the committee of the scholar affair of 1996, the well-known scandal, where a physicist published not factual information disguised as a research paper. The countries have not yet come to an agreement on how to regulate such publications, but many have voiced their ideas. Denmark for instance proposed to establish a common ground of shared standards to simplify the verification of what qualifies as scientific articles. This raises the question of who has the authority to decide what is and what isn’t a scientific paper, and the even more important question of what even qualifies as research. Would countries, universities or publishers be responsible for making those decisions? Each of these options could have negative impacts on the freedom of the press. For instance, if publishers were able to choose what qualifies as science, lobbyism would be taken to another level, enforcing corruption and possibly even censorship.
On the contrary to Denmark and most of its co-members of WIPO, Serbia stated that the academics consuming these articles should be the ones responsible for checking the reliability and correctness of the articles they read, as they are the experts in their respective domains.
All in all, the discussion remained very civil. Except for one question to Serbia, regarding their above-mentioned proposition, the discussion mostly consisted of monologues, each delegation not really taking into account what the others brought up, leading us to believe this will be another discussion tabled until further notice, like so many others.
Photo: Charlotte May, Pexels
Comments are closed.