Governing Pooled Knowledge Resources : Building Institutions for Sustainable Scientific, Cultural and genetic Resources Commons

12-14th September 2012, Université catholique de Louvain

The 1st Global Thematic IASC Conference on the Knowledge Commons aims to bring together leading people from a number of international scientific research communities, social science researchers, practitioners and policy analysts, to discuss the rationale and practical feasibility of institutional arrangements designed to emulate key public domain conditions for collaborative research.

A variety of initiatives and policies have been proposed that are going beyond “open access”, and aim to facilitate more effective and extensive (global) sharing on local and global pools of not only scientific information and data but also genetic resources and cultural expressions. There is thus a need to examine a number of these proposals’ conceptual foundations from the economic and legal perspectives and to analyze the roles of the public domain and commons in facilitating sharing of scientific and technical data, information and materials.

There will be six tracks for abstract submissions:

Track 1 on “Scientific Research and Innovation Commons”
Track 2 on “Digital Information Commons”
Track 3 on “Historical experience of the knowledge commons”
Track 4 on “Genetic Resource Commons”
Track 5 on “Cultural Commons”
Cross-cutting conference track 6 on climate change

All of them require an online abstract submission of max. 400 words. Deadline for submission is 15 January 2012. All submission will be reviewed by an international review panel on the basis of scientific quality, relevance to the conference themes and originality before being accepted.

For full paper presentations, the paper has to be submitted no later than 1 August 2012. Conference organisers are undertaking all efforts to ensure funding to reimburse travel costs and participation fees of presenters coming from non-OECD countries.