PrepCom3 : Civil Society Statement
Presentation : Plenary Session - Wednesday 17 September 2003

A partial contribution by the Working Group on
Scientific Information

to the Statement pronounced
by Rik Panganiban [email protected]

E-Government / E-Democracy Civil Society Content Group

My name is Rik Panganiban of the World Federalist Movement, speaking on behalf of the e-Government / e-Democracy Content Group. We would like to make a brief intervention in reference to Section 2: Access to Information and Knowledge:

On the question of access to public information, we would like to emphasize that access to information is important at all levels, from the local to the global. In addition to access to government documents online (as referenced in paragraph 15c & d), the Action Plan should call for free access on the Internet to public information from the United Nations, the Bretton Woods Institutions, and other inter-governmental bodies as well. This would model the level of transparency and public access their government members should strive towards.

In particular, we would like stress the importance of universal and free access to the United Nations Official Document System, which contains all public UN documents in the six official languages.

On behalf on the working group on Scientific Information, we suggest that in paragraph 15, section e) should be modified so that the whole section should be read as e} Establish a program, funded by the UN (or its agencies) to provide financial and technical support to Open Access journals, to create a worldwide support and hosting site for Open Access journals and books, to create a distributed open archive for scientific information.