Symposium on the Role of Scientific and Technical Data and Information in the Public Domain

5-6 September 2002
National Academy of Sciences Auditorium
2100 C Street NW

Washington, DC

New: The Role of Scientific and Technical Data and Information in the Public Domain: Proceedings of a Workshop is now available. For hard copies of this report, please contact Amy Franklin.

The body of scientific and technical data and information (STI)* in the public domain is massive and has contributed broadly to the economic, social, and intellectual vibrancy of our nation. The “public domain” may be defined in legal terms as sources and types of data and information whose uses are not restricted by statutory intellectual property laws or by other legal regimes, and that are accordingly available to the public for use without authorization. In recent years, however, there have been growing legal, economic, and technological pressures that restrict the creation and availability of public-domain information—scientific and otherwise. It is therefore important to review the role, value, and limits on public domain STI.

New and revised laws have broadened, deepened, and lengthened the scope of intellectual property and neighboring rights in data and information, while at the same time redefining and limiting the availability of specific types of information in the public domain. National security concerns also constrain the scope of information that can be made publicly available. Economic pressures on both government and university producers of scientific data similarly have narrowed the scope of such information placed in the public domain, thus introducing access and use restrictions on resources that were previously openly available to researchers, educators, and others. Finally, advances in digital rights management technologies for enforcing proprietary rights in various information products pose some of the greatest potential restrictions on the types of STI that should be accessible in the public domain.

Nevertheless, various well-established mechanisms for preserving public domain access to STI—such as public archives, libraries, data centers, and ever increasing numbers of open Web sites—exist in the government, university, and not-for-profit sectors. In addition, innovative institutional and legal models for making available digital information resources in the public domain or through “open access initiatives” are now being developed by different groups in the scientific, educational, library, and legal communities.

The Symposium on the Role of Scientific and Technical Data and Information in the Public Domain brought together leading experts and managers from the public and private sectors who are involved in the creation, dissemination, and use of STI to discuss: (1) the role, value, and limits of making STI available in the public domain for research and education, (2) the various legal, economic, and technological pressures on the producers of public domain STI, and the potential effects of these pressures on research and education, (3) the existing and proposed approaches for preserving the STI in the public domain or for providing “open access” in the United States, and (4) other important issues in this area that may benefit from further analysis. The Symposium was chaired by R. Stephen Berry, James Franck Distinguished Service Professor of Chemistry at the University of Chicago and Home Secretary of the National Academy of Sciences. For additional information please contact: Paul F. Uhlir, Director of International S&T Information Programs, the National Academies, tel. (202) 334 2807; e-mail: puhlir@nas.edu.

Funding for this symposium is being provided by the Center for the Public Domain, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the National Library of Medicine, the National Science Foundation, and the National Weather Service.

* “STI” has been used for several decades to refer to Scientific and Technical Information, generally limited to S&T literature. For purposes of this symposium, we use it in the broader sense to refer also to scientific data, in order to be comprehensive.