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 sign it here.