<div dir="ltr"><div><br></div>WHO has a new vision for information sharing<div><p style="margin:0px 0px 1.714285714rem;padding:0px;border:0px;vertical-align:baseline"><font color="#444444" face="Open Sans, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14px;line-height:24px"><a href="http://www.who.int/about/who_reform/change_at_who/issue4/information-sharing/en/index.html#.UuVWA8pwYm-">http://www.who.int/about/who_reform/change_at_who/issue4/information-sharing/en/index.html#.UuVWA8pwYm-</a></span></font><br>
</p><p style="margin:0px 0px 1.714285714rem;padding:0px;border:0px;vertical-align:baseline"><span style="color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px;line-height:18px"><i>A new policy on open access will be announced in January 2014 and come into force in July 2014. The policy will apply to all WHO-authored or WHO-funded research published in non-WHO publications, such as external journals and books.</i></span><font color="#444444" face="Open Sans, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"><br>
</font></p><p style="margin:0px 0px 1.714285714rem;padding:0px;border:0px;vertical-align:baseline"><span style="color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px;line-height:18px"><i>The Institutional Repository for Information Sharing (IRIS), created in 2012, enables more people to access WHO’s information products. IRIS is the multilingual digital library of WHO, providing free access to the full text of WHO information products in the six official languages.</i></span><span style="color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px;line-height:18px"><br>
</span></p><p style="margin:0px 0px 1.714285714rem;padding:0px;border:0px;vertical-align:baseline"><span style="color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px;line-height:18px">And this is exactly what the repository does, providing access. Searching the IRIS I noticed for all publications the exclusive copyright notice. This means that in principle WHO is NOT offering open access in the sense that we understand it. The material can in principle just be read. </span><span style="color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px;line-height:18px">For me this reflects the difficulty with many repositories, that it is perfectly unclear on the subject of re-use.</span><span style="font-size:13px;color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;line-height:18px"> Imagine that I want to select a subset of publications from the WHO repository for use in another location, it is not allowed. </span><span style="font-size:13px;color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;line-height:18px"> </span><span style="font-size:13px;color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;line-height:18px">if you are not allowed re-use the information is almost useless </span><span style="color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px;line-height:18px">The repository structure promotes fragmentation.</span><span style="color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px;line-height:18px">The fact that the information you want is sitting in multiple locations in 'ópen access' repositories makes it more difficult to find ,and nothing can be done since aggregating is also re-use. If we were allowed to duplicate the publications that we need then we could build topical databases that would simplify access. As long as repositories are not open access in the sense of the Berlin declaration they will not be as useful as they could be. I am utterly amazed that an organization as big as the WHO offers read-only open access as their new vision of information sharing.</span></p>
<p style="margin:0px 0px 1.714285714rem;padding:0px;border:0px;vertical-align:baseline"><span style="color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px;line-height:18px">I would really be interested to know the vision of other following this list concerning this topic</span></p>
<p style="margin:0px 0px 1.714285714rem;padding:0px;border:0px;vertical-align:baseline"><span style="color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px;line-height:18px">. and</span></p>-- <br><div dir="ltr">
<div>Tom Olijhoek<br>Codex Consult</div><div><a href="http://www.codexconsult.eu" target="_blank">www.codexconsult.eu</a></div><div>coordinator @ccess open access working group at OKF</div><div>DOAJ member of Advisory Board</div>
<div>freelance advisor for the WorldBank Publishing Group</div><div>TEL +(31)645540804</div><div>SKYPE tom.olijhoek</div><div>Twitter @ccess</div><div>LinkedIn <a href="http://nl.linkedin.com/in/tomolijhoek/" target="_blank">http://nl.linkedin.com/in/tomolijhoek/</a></div>
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