The Bouchout Declaration for Open Biodiversity Knowledge Management aims to promote openness of digital biodiversity data and provide a way for institutions and individuals to show their commitment to open science.
The signatories mission is to promote free and open access to data and information about biodiversity by people and computers and to bring about an inclusive and shared knowledge management infrastructure that will allow society to respond more effectively to the challenges of the present and future.
Collaborative Open Biodiversity Knowledge Management can bring together the achievements of many independent biodiversity projects, yet will allow them to retain their identity and missions. The resulting virtual pool of information will allow new services to emerge for everyone who relies on information about life on Earth. Awareness of, access to, preservation, and curation of information will be enhanced by a shared and seamless network of infrastructures. By enabling tracking data linking and citations, all who create, organise, or mobilise data will be fully credited for their contributions.
Open Biodiversity Knowledge Management will improve availability to information, increase the role and relevance of its participants, increase their impact, and reduce costs. We will understand our natural world better and manage it better.
An overarching approach to Open Biodiversity Knowledge Management based on the following fundamental principles is encouraged:
- The free and open use of digital resources about biodiversity and associated access services;
- Licenses or waivers that grant or allow all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, right to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly as well as to build on the work and to make derivative works, subject to proper attribution consistent with community practices, while recognising that providers may develop commercial products with more restrictive licensing.
- Policy developments that will foster free and open access to biodiversity data;
- Tracking the use of identifiers in links and citations to ensure that sources and suppliers of data are assigned credit for their contributions;
- An agreed infrastructure, standards and protocols to improve access to and use of open data;
- Registers for content and services to allow discovery, access and use of open data;
- Persistent identifiers for data objects and physical objects such as specimens, images and taxonomic treatments with standard mechanisms to take users directly to content and data;
- Linking data using agreed vocabularies, both within and beyond biodiversity, that enable participation in the Linked Open Data Cloud;
- Dialogue to refine the concept, priorities and technical requirements of Open Biodiversity Knowledge Management;
- A sustainable Open Biodiversity Knowledge Management that is attentive to scientific, sociological, legal, and financial aspects.
Over 65 organisations have already signed the declaration, including Sussex Biodiversity Record Centre, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, from the UK. The NBN Trust would encourage Network colleagues to look at this and consider signing the declaration, which you can do here.
You can see which organisations have signed here and which individuals here