19^th International CODATA Conference
Category: Poster

Building a Biodiversity Commons: Institutional Missions and Electronic Information Access in the Life Sciences

Gretchen Schwarz
Rutgers University, School of Communication, Information, and Library Studies, USA

The National Research Council (NRC) ranks research on biodiversity among food production, global climate change, and the treatment and prevention of communicable disease as crucial research sciences that are severely constrained by unequal access to information between and among nations. The NRC strongly recommends knowledge producers adopt an information policy that promotes "full and open exchange" of data and research as an essential component of national and international cooperation. (*)

This poster presents an in-depth analysis of the institution types responsible for the electronic publication of scholarly research in the life sciences for North American countries. It explores how those institutional missions align with an open-access or commons model for information exchange. In an bibliographic analysis of indexed research articles in the major life science databases Zoological Record and BIOSIS for the period 1978 to 2002, we find that 78 percent of the literature originates from non-profit and public service-oriented organizations such as professional associations, museums, and public universities.(**) The missions of these types of organizations are associated with an information policy of open access, though institutional roles with respect to the provision of information often lack definition, particularly with respect to electronic access. The poster outlines the results of the bibliographic analysis and reviews the economic and historical contexts of each of the institution types represented in the sample. It compares and contrasts the value of biodiversity information as a part of technology transfer with other areas of the sciences such as biotechnology. It considers how well an open-access publication regime aligns with the missions of each institutional type.

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* National Research Council. 1997. Bits of Power: Issues in Global Access to Scientific Data. Washington D.C.: National Academy Press.
** The research library at the American Museum of Natural History administered the bibliographic research on behalf of the North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC).