Bouchout Declaration
The purpose of the Bouchout Declaration is to help make digital data about our biodiversity openly available. It offers members of the biodiversity community a way to demonstrate their commitment to open science.
As signatories, we encourage an overarching approach to Open Biodiversity Knowledge Management which is based on the following fundamental principles:
- 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, world-wide, 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 recognizing 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.
You can read here more about the Bouchout Declaration or please send us an email to bouchoutdeclaration@plazi.org.