A South African voice for the A2K treaty and OA mandates

Monika Ermert and Robert W. Smith, IGF: more free content for the Internet, Heise Online, November 2, 2006.  Excerpt:

As a counterpoint to ever more stringent copyright provisions an international treaty on Access to Knowledge (A2K) should be drawn up, a South African representative during a discussion on the openness of networks at the Internet Governance Forum has said. For some time now South Africa, a number of governments of newly industrialized countries as well as non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have been advertising the A2K Initiative toward the member states of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). "I consider such a treaty to be possible," Hanne Sophie Greve, a former judge at the European Court of Justice now at the Council of Europe, said.

Ms. Greve at the same time declared that she was very much in favor of making the results of publicly-funded research available to the public. "I believe that the institutions in question should undertake to make these contents available on the Internet," she said. It was moreover impossible to understand why in the domain of medical research in particular people who volunteered to take part in trials and consented to having their data used should in the end be barred from accessing the research results obtained, she stated. Of course it was also important to take the rights of authors into account, she added....