The UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science (2021) provides an international framework for the global transformation of societies towards Open Science. It sets out the fundamental principles of human rights and ethics that define the leading role UNESCO has in ensuring science benefits all by promoting just and equitable access to knowledge and other products of the scientific endeavour.
UNESCO, ISC, CODATA and WDS organised a symposium to explore the existing and most recent cooperative scientific, digital, and ethics frameworks for advancing the implementation of the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science across its Areas of Action.
We spoke to Debora Drucker (Embrapa) who presented at the Symposium on behalf of WP10:
“I presented our approach of building the case study on agricultural biodiversity within the WolrdFAIR project as an example and strategy of dealing with the data challenges in agricultural sciences, which are inherently interdisciplinary and need interoperability across domains and societies. This initiative was born within the IGAD/RDA Improving Global Agricultural Data (IGAD) Community of Practice and gathers various initiatives, especially the TDWG Biological Interaction Data Interest Group and the SURPASS2 project, which is also linked to the Brazilian Network of Plant-Pollinator Interactions.
Plant-pollinator interactions sustain biodiversity, so they also support directly or indirectly most of the Sustainable Development Goals. Our major goal is to ensure FAIR data for understanding plant-pollinator interactions at biologically relevant scales for crops. We identified opportunities of aligning ongoing efforts to FAIRify plant-pollinator data: through the GBIF Unified data model, the Cross-Domain Interoperability Framework (CDIF) and finding commonalities with the other domains. For instance – how does climate change affect pollinators and pollination? What about disasters?
The key messages of my presentation at the Symposium were:
Building on Existing Communities of Practice is Key,
Ensuring Global participation is needed (across domains and societies),
Research institutions and data driven decision making initiatives must be aligned,
Science Policy Initiatives (IPBES, UNESCO,…) drive important efforts that can really make a difference for advancing knowledge and inform decisions.”
Debora’s slides are available here.





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