[WSIS CS-Plenary] ANNOUNCING THE INTERNATIONAL RESEARCHERS' CHARTER

[Meigs]

ANNOUNCING THE INTERNATIONAL RESEARCHERS' CHARTER

The International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR)
is planning to launch the Charter below in Tunis, after having announced it
in its prepcom3 side-event.

We are seeking YOUR SUPPORT either as an individual, an NGO, a family or a
caucus to support the Charter and to broadcast it as widely as possible.

Please take some time to read the principles and their implementation and
then go to the following address for endorsement :
http://www.PetitionOnline.com/iamcr/


For any more information you can contact the IAMCR-WSIS taskforce or go the
site < iamcr.net>

Divina Frau-Meigs and Marc Raboy, coordinators of the IAMCR-WSIS taskforce



Text of charter below and in attachment:

The International Researchers¹ Charter for Knowledge Societies

 ‹ an IAMCR contribution to the WSIS ‹

 

Worldwide, research activity is confronted by diminishing budgets and
increasing control of output by a variety of actors including governments,
while researchers are being submitted to unprecedented and deleterious
changes in their status, salaries and the independence of their
investigations. The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) has
helped to foster discussion worldwide on the need for unhindered and equal
access to the means of communication and information content. The importance
of information arising from high quality research in the humanities and the
sciences has not, however, been sufficiently emphasized during the Summit.
It has not emphasized the central role played by researchers in producing
information, in promoting a better understanding of media and ICT systems
and their content and functions, and in developing culturally relevant
content and fostering communication in support of the attainment of
inclusive and people-centred Knowledge Societies. Therefore, the
International Association for Media and Communications Research (IAMCR)
calls upon researchers worldwide to subscribe to the following Researchers¹
Charter principles and recommendations for action:

 

Charter Principles:

         1. Researchers worldwide constitute a community of scholars that is
central to the development of societies in which knowledge, information and
culture are produced and appropriated in the service of humankind and in
which researchers are entitled to seek, retrieve, receive and distribute
information freely, regardless of geographical borders and the medium used,
supported by information exchange enabled by ICTs;

 
         2. Researchers¹ work should be conducted in working conditions
which acknowledge that research is crucial to knowledge production and
intellectual development and that researchers¹ contributions to knowledge
are significant in achieving a better understanding among peoples, cultures
and disciplinary traditions;
 
         3. Researchers should be entitled to intellectual freedom and to
transparent evaluation of their results by independent, legitimate public
bodies; to express themselves as freely as possible without censorship or
curtailment of the distribution of their intellectual outputs using all
media and ICTs so as to maintain and expand the global public domain of
research and to foster the capacity to contribute to cultural diversity, as
well as to ensure informed participation by all citizens in social, cultural
and economic activities, thereby promoting a democratic environment at all
levels and in all contexts;

 

         4. The results of publicly funded research should remain in the
public domain so as to support the development, education and welfare of the
general population; public archives, libraries, repositories of content and
other Internet and information services worldwide should be accessible to
researchers without barriers to access;

         

         5. The universal free exchange among researchers of intellectual
work should be regarded as being of critical importance to maintaining a
democratic order; it is integral to capacity building for equitable
development, to overcoming differences in gender and training, particularly
with respect to women and junior researchers especially in developing
countries, and in accessing other resources essential for development; it
must be regarded as a common good and nurtured as a participatory and
collective process involving a network of distributed intellectual work that
contributes to lifelong capacity-building in all realms of human activity;

 

6. Culturally appropriate learning and research practices should be
developed to foster community-based self-supporting systems of research; to
promote open, collaborative and self-organizing publishing models and
software development methods that are accessible to researchers and
available in not-for-profit databases, libraries and archives; thereby
supporting researchers as content producers and as active participants in
the open access paradigm of knowledge creation and exchange, as outlined in
various initiatives.[1] <#_ftn1>
 
Implementing the Charter:
a. IAMCR invites all researchers, including educators and computer and
information science professionals, to adhere to the above principles, by
signing this Charter.
 
b. IAMCR invites researchers to strengthen opportunities for cooperation and
exchange and to foster communication with all sectors of society with the
aim of promoting greater understanding of the role and relevance of research
and knowledge and their wide dissemination in society, by mobilizing
decision makers worldwide to develop clear policies to implement the above
principles.
 
c. IAMCR recommends the establishment of an independent international
Researchers¹ Complaints body where researchers can lodge complaints about
violations of the above principles and receive an unbiased hearing; such a
body should have a mandate to make cases public and to publicise university
administrations and governments that violate these principles.
 
Signing this Charter:
IAMCR invites the world¹s leading bodies that support these principles and
individuals to sign this Charter at http://www.PetitionOnline.com/iamcr/
and to disseminate this Charter widely.
 
Contact: divina.frau-meigs at univ-paris3.fr
 


[1] <#_ftnref1>  Budapest Open Access Initiative
(http://www.biomedcentral.com/openaccess/www/?issue=4 ), Berlin Declaration
(http://www.zim.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/berlindeclaration.html ), Creative
Commons (http://creativecommons.org/ ), Open Courseware Initiative
(http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html ), IFLA Internet Manifesto
(http://www.ifla.org/III/misc/im-e.htm), etc.

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