At a meeting taking place on 5 March 2004 the possibility of hosting the CODATA International Conference and General Assembly in South Africa in either 2008 or 2010 was considered. A decision in principle will be taken at a special meeting slated for October 2004. Of more immediate concern was the question of a Task Group on Archiving of Digital Data having a workshop for participants from the 14 countries of the Southern African Development Community (SADC). This possibility was discussed at a TG meeting in Paris in 2003. It was left to three members of SANC to negotiate this further with the TG at a subsequent meeting to be held following the Workshop on Archiving taking place in China PRC in June 2004.

The Workshop on Strategies for Preservation of and Open Access to Scientific Data which took place in Beijing on June 22-24, 2004 was attended by Dr Makhubela, Prof Rossouw and Ms Van den Berg with each one of them being either session chair or rapporteur at selected sessions. At the conclusion of the Workshop a meeting was held of TG members where the planned SADC workshop was discussed in more detail.

A special meeting of the SANC was scheduled for 8 October 2004 primarily to discuss the logistics of the SADC workshop as far as local arrangements were concerned. The details of the workshop programme was to be discussed at a TG meeting scheduled for taking place during the Berlin conference.

PARTICIPATION IN CODATA EXECUTIVE BOARD

The SANC Chairman is a member of CODATA˜s Executive Board, having just completed the maximum of three consecutive terms since 1998. Since the establishment of CODATA˜s Data Science Journal, he acted as chair of the Journal Committee, and is at present serving on the Committee evaluating the journal which is at present being published in electronic format by Queens University Belfast.. He furthermore serves on the Committee on Membership Dues, and is a member of the TG on Data Archiving and serves as the EB liaison for this TG. He attended the Executive Board meetings held in Paris, 2003 and Warsaw, 2004.

ISSUES OF IMPORTANCE

Data sources in Africa are at risk of not being recorded over the longer term, are not being archived and accordingly are not readily accessible. Poor ITC infrastructure on the continent, lack of technical expertise, and low levels of finance for S&T endeavours is a cause of concern. With the decision by ICSU to devote specific attention to S&T developments in developing countries, five ICSU Regional Offices have been established, with the Regional Office for Africa to be housed at the NRF in Pretoria, South Africa. The inaugural meeting for the Regional Office for Africa will take place in Harare, Zimbabwe on 9-11 October 2004. The SANC Chair will be attending this meeting on behalf of the CODATA Executive Board of which he is a member. This will be an opportunity to sensitise the participants to the importance of good data practices for sustainable development.

ATTENDANCE AT RELEVANT MEETINGS

The International Symposium on Open Access and the Public Domain in Digital Data and Information for Science, jointly organized by ICSU, UNESCO, The U.S. National Academies, CODATA and ICSTI, which took place at UNESCO Headquarters on 10-11 March 2003, was attended by Dr Makhubela and Prof Rossouw. Dr Andrew Kaniki of the NRF delivered a paper on Information Needs for Basic Research: An African Perspective at a session chaired by Dr Makhubela.

At the Frontiers of Scientific and Technical Data conference (CODATA 2002 18^th International Conference) in Quebec, Canada, Themba Mohoto delivered a paper titled Complex Data from Health Research. At the session on data archiving, Wiliam Andersson and Steve Rossouw presented the Report of Activities of the CODATA Working Group on Archiving Scientific Data. A paper by Stander, Van der Merwe and Rossouw was also presented at the same session under the title Long Term Data Storage: Are we getting closer to a Solution? A Roundtable Discussion on Preservation and Archiving of S&T Data in Developing Countries had Steve Rossouw as one of the four organizers. Conrad Sebego had a poster on Ensuring Sustainability Access to Data - a value based approach.

Report submitted by Prof Steve Rossouw
Chair: South African National Committee for CODATA
10 September 2004