2007 Activities2007 Activities
The Information Program works to increase public access to knowledge, facilitate communication among civil society groups, and protect civil liberties and the freedom to communicate in the digital environment. The program gives particular attention to the information needs of disadvantaged groups and less developed parts of the world.
There is a growing awareness around the world that global intellectual property rules are unbalanced and at odds with the public interest, creating barriers to scientific and medical information in places where it is most needed. For example, bilateral trade agreements between developed and developing countries often deny the poorer countries the same fair use rights that are enshrined in the laws of richer countries.
The program addressed this issue in 2007 by supporting the Access to Knowledge advocacy coalition in its successful efforts to get the UN World Intellectual Property Organization to adopt a new development agenda that aims to make intellectual property rules more responsive to the needs of poorer countries. The program also supported projects to devise reforms and alternative approaches to copyright in Brazil, Kenya, Macedonia, Serbia, and South Africa.
The Open Access Initiative, a multiyear Information Program advocacy effort to make access to scholarly information more equitable and affordable across the globe, helped prompt significant change at the U.S. National Institutes of Health. The agency, the world’s largest funder of scientific research, responded to open access advocates by mandating that all journal publications resulting from NIH-funded research should be available to the public. Many other research funding agencies around the world are expected to adopt similar policies.
The idea of open access to publicly funded information is being expanded to educational and legal materials. Together with the Shuttleworth Foundation, the Information Program initiated the development and launch of the Cape Town Open Education Declaration, the founding statement for efforts to allow textbooks and other educational materials to be freely translated and adapted around the world. The program advanced open access to legal materials in Africa through a project that made case law from 18 southern African countries freely available online.
To increase access to publications on business, science and technology, the social sciences, and the humanities, the program continued to support Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL), a global consortium of libraries in transition and developing countries. EIFL provides low-cost access to thousands of premium journals through a consortium of more than 3,000 libraries in over 50 countries that serve about 5 million students, teachers, researchers, and citizens.
Helping civil society groups use information technology, program grantees brought together organizations in Africa that use mobile phones for monitoring and advocacy for the purpose of developing toolkits for civil society. In Ukraine, a program-supported blogcamp brought together several hundred bloggers and youth activists from across the Commonwealth of Independent States. The public affairs website Transitions Online worked with NewEurasia.net to promote citizen journalism among youth and civil society organizations in Central Asia. The Tactical Technology Collective used program support to produce Visualizing Information for Advocacy: An Introduction to Information Design, a handbook on using design tools and techniques to make data more transparent and accessible in advocacy campaigning.
The program also supported work on monitoring and circumventing Internet censorship worldwide by groups such as the OpenNet Initiative, and the drafting of a code of conduct for major IT companies providing search, email, and blogging services to protect users' rights, especially in repressive countries. The program also sustained a network of electronic privacy activists across Europe, and pursued policy advocacy in Eastern Africa to ensure access to major new Internet infrastructure in the region.
