This news release is available in German.
On 29 May 2013, the 2nd Annual Global Meeting of the Global Research Council (GRC) in Berlin has ended. Over three days, the heads of about 70 science and research councils from around the world as well as high-ranking guests from science and research, science administration and research policy attended the meeting. The topics of discussion and endorsement were an Action Plan towards Open Access, a high-level Statement of Principles for Research Integrity as well as new statutes for the GRC. Hosted jointly by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the National Council of Technological and Scientific Development (CNPq) of Brazil, the 2nd Annual Global Meeting was the largest of its kind so far and represented some 80 percent of the world's public, non-ministerial research potential.
The outcomes of the meeting's discussions as well as the endorsed documents were presented at a press conference on 29 May 2013 in the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften in Berlin. DFG-President Professor Peter Strohschneider stressed the relevance of "Open Access" to publications as a main paradigm of scientific communication in the following years. The participants agreed that sharing research publications openly is a means to increase the quality of research communication and thus of research itself. The endorsed Action Plan includes activities by which GRC member organisations can foster the open exchange of research results with a high degree of flexibility. Therefore the plan specifies three basic principles: encouragement, awareness rising, and support for researchers that wish to provide their results in Open Access. The implementation requires engaging a number of stakeholders: in addition to scientists and scholars themselves, for instance, universities, science organisations, libraries, and publishers. The endorsed Principles for Research Integrity point out that researchers and institutions themselves remain ultimately responsible for undertaking research with integrity. On the other hand, research funding agencies have an obligation to ensure that supported research corresponds to the highest standards possible, as CNPq-President Professor Glaucius Oliva stated.
Both the Action Plan and the Principles for Research Integrity had been developed at a set of regional meetings held around the world since autumn 2012. "Research integrity and Open Access are two topics of high complexity and with ramifications for all funding agencies. In the light of that, the two agreements appear the more remarkable", DFG-President Strohschneider concluded.
Strohschneider also pointed out the presence of many international, high-level representatives as evidence of their work in support of enhanced collaboration across the international research community: "It has been our goal and a pleasure to bring together the world of research and research funding to Berlin." For the DFG, he said, the Annual Meeting 2013 was an opportunity to draw the world's attention to our own standards and the German model of research funding which is based solely on criteria of scientific and scholarly quality and free from political, economic, or other reasoning.
Source: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft