InforMEA was launched during the Second Steering Committee Meeting of the MEA Information and Knowledge Management Initiative, which is supported by UNEP. The meeting is bringing together approximately 25 representatives from MEAs, UN agencies and observers in Glion, Switzerland, from 14-16 June 2011, where participants also will  brainstorm possibilities for collaboration related to online reporting, an MEA college, and extensions of the InforMEA (UN Information Portal on MEAs) interoperability project.

In a keynote speech at the launch, John Scanlon, Secretary General of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), noted that InforMEA provides a useful and tangible project that seeks to deliver information that parties want. He emphasized the need to give coherent expression to the entire body of international environmental law and to show how MEAs are relevant to sustainable development in the lead-up to the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD, or Rio+20). Scanlon said this portal will contribute to these efforts.

Maria Louisa Silva, Executive Secretary of the Barcelona Convention (Mediterranean Action Plan), also offered a keynote speech. She highlighted the importance of innovation and the development of linkages among conventions, and noted that these activities require information exchange.

To announce the launch, UNEP and the MEAs prepared joint press releases. [IISD RS Sources] [InforMEA Webportal] [UNEP Press Release] [Ramsar Convention Press Release] [CMS Press Release]

source: http://uncsd.iisd.org/news/unep-meas-launch-informea-webportal/

Read the press release here.

The full text of the resolution on UNEP (Report of the Governing Council of the United Nations Environment Programme on its eleventh special session (draft resolution A/C.2/65/L.43) including IPBES, will shortly be available on the UNGA 65th session’s website.

The resolution underlines a further success of the UN’s International Year of Biodiversity and should  provide a boost to the International Year of Forests which begins in January 2011, and the international decade of  biodiversity, also beginning in January 2011.
This is a major event ion the world of biodiversity and ecosystem services as the IPCC-like platform will bridge the gulf between the wealth of scientific  knowledge on the accelerating declines and degradation of the natural world, with knowledge on effective solutions and decisive government action required to reverse these damaging trends.
IPBES will then be addressed in the UNEP Executive Director report to the Twenty-sixth session of the Governing Council/ Global Ministerial Environment Forum to be held in Nairobi on 21-24 February.  Document UNEP/GC.26/6 will present the outcome of the third IPBES meeting held in Busan, in accordance with decision SS.XI/4 of the Governing Council. It contains suggested action on a further process to establish IPBES.

The A to Z guide is an online resource to provide clear, concise and relevant information about various areas important for biodiversity conservation ranging from World Heritage Sites to Key Biodiversity Areas, which can be used by all sectors including business, government and environmental agencies. 

This guide has been prepared by UNEP-WCMC, in partnership with the International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM), the International Petroleum Industry Environmental Conservation Association (IPIECA), the European Investment Bank (EIB), the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD).

The Friends of the Conservation Commons came into force in January 2010 (www.conservationcommons.net) through signature of the Charter by three founding members. The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), the United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC) and The Nature Conservancy (TNC) signed the Charter of the Friends of the Conservation Commons shortly after the final version was opened for signature in December 2009, bringing it into force in January 2010 as part of the IYB celebrations. The side event will introduce the Friends of the Conservation Commons, discuss removing barriers to data sharing and incentives to participation and encouraging open access to data, and provide an opportunity for signature of the Charter by like-minded organizations. Signatories comply to the following principles: 1 -Open Access: Promotes free and open access to data, information and knowledge for conservation purposes. 2-Mutual Benefit: Welcomes and encourages participants both to use resources and to contribute data, information and knowledge. 3-Rights and Responsibilities: Contributors have full right to attribution for any uses of their data, information, or knowledge, and the right to ensure that the original integrity of their contribution to the Commons is preserved.

The Berlin8 open access conference will first time come to the place outside Europe, in October 2010, Beijing, China. It will be co-host by Chinese Academy of Sciences and Max Planck Society, co-organized by National Science Library, CAS and Max Planck Digital Library.

Theme: Implementation Progress, Best Practices, and Future Challenges

Sub-themes:

• Trends in international open scholarly communications and open access
• Strategies and policies of planning and funding agencies
• OA strategies, policies, and implementation of R&D institutions
• Open data and open education
• Legal and economical issues in OA
• Administrative and operational issues in implementing OA
• Supporting infrastructure for sustainable OA
• OA in the world

Berlin 8 Open Access Conference Program update!

Call for Posters!

Call for Participation!

You are cordially invited to take part in the Berlin 8 Open Access Conference!

The Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association is pleased to announce the 2nd Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing, which will be held from 22 to 24 August 2010 in Prague, Czech Republic.

Schedule:

Saturday August 21st

• 7:00pm- Drinks meet-up at the Piano Bar in the Hotel President

Sunday August 22nd

• 11:00am- Conference registration begins
• 12:00-12:30- Paul Peters: Opening Remarks from the Conference Chair
• 12:30-1:30- Caroline Sutton: Keynote Address from the OASPA Chair
• 1:30-2:45- Session on Mixed Model Publishers (Chaired by David Ross)
  • Trish Groves- Executive Editor of the British Medical Journal
  • Wim van der Stelt- Executive Vice President for Business Development, Springer
• 2:45-3:30- Coffee Break
• 3:30-5:00- Session on Funding and Payment Models (Chaired by Matt Cockerill)
  • Chuck Eckman- Director of Collections for the UC Berkeley Library
  • Matt Cockerill- Managing Director of BioMed Central
  • Paul Peters- Head of Business Development for Hindawi Publishing Corporation
  • Mark Patterson- Director of Publishing for the Public Library of Science

Monday August 23rd

• 9:00-10:00- Morning Keynote Address: Salvatore Mele- CERN/SOAP
• 10:00-11:00- Coffee Break
• 11:00-12:30- Session on Editorial Innovation in OA Publishing (Chaired by Mark Patterson)
  • Ulrich Pöschl- Chief Executive Editor of Atmospheric Chemistry & Physics
  • Rob van Glabbeek- Editor-in-Chief of the Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science
  • Daniel Mietchen- Structural Brain Mapping Group at Friedrich Schiller University
• 12:30-1:30- Lunch at the Hotel President
• 1:30-3:30- Parallel Breakout Sessions
  • Breakout Session on Publishing Ethics
  • Breakout Session on OA Book Publishing
  • Breakout Session on Centralized Payment Mechanisms for OA Publishing Costs
• 3:30-4:30- Coffee Break
• 4:30-5:15- Reports from the Afternoon Breakout Sessions
• 5:15-6:00 – Workshop discussing the results of the SOAP Survey (Optional)
• 7:30- Conference Dinner at Obcanska Plovarna

Tuesday August 24th

• 9:00-10:00- Session on OA in Different Communities: Part 1 (Chaired by Caroline Sutton)
  • Eelco Ferwerda- OAPEN Coordinator/ Amsterdam University Press
  • Susan Murray- Director of African Journals Online (AJOL)
  • Petr Sojka – Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
• 10:00-10:30 Coffee Break
• 10:30-11:00 Session on OA in Different Communities: Part 2 (Chaired by Caroline Sutton)
  • Donna Livingstone – The University of Calgary Press
  • Victoria Tsoukala – the National Documentation Centre, EKT
• 11:00-11:30 Paul Peters: Closing Remarks from the Conference Chair
• 1:00-5:00 Workshop on Creating and Managing Open Access Journals (requires separate registration)

Conference Organizing Committee

• Paul Peters, Conference Chair- Hindawi Publishing Corporation
• Caroline Sutton- Co-Action Publishing
• David Ross- SAGE Publications
• Mark Patterson- Public Library of Science
• Matt Cockeril- BioMed Central

For more information, contact paul.peters@hindawi.com

Date and time:
Friday, 11 June 2010, 9:00 h -18:00 h
Room:
130, UN Campus – Langer Eugen, Hermann-Ehlers-Str. 10, Bonn
Organizer:
United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification

A sub-set of two impact indicators was identified as the minimum required for reporting by affected countries beginning in 2012: land cover status and proportion of the population in affected areas living above the poverty line

In order to enable affected countries to report on the two impact indicators in 2012, the CST was requested to prepare a glossary of terms and definitions and to continue work on methodologies for collecting, processing, monitoring and reporting the relevant data needed to effectively use them

A meeting with relevant institutions and/or agencies that have experience related to the implementation of the sub-set of two impact indicators will be held on 11 June 2010. The meeting will give the opportunity to invited institutions and/or agencies to exchange information on international developments related to impact indicators and to share their experiences in implementing them

The meeting would have, among its specific objectives:

a. To discuss methodologies in use to measure the sub-set of two impact indicators and provide practical recommendations on data collection, processing, monitoring and reporting methods for the production of these indicators;

b. To review availability, accessibility and quality of the necessary data for the sub-set of impact indicators and to identify data sources and gaps.

c. To initiate the discussion on the technical support that the invited institutions and/or agencies could provide in the reporting process of the sub-set of impact indicators at the global and the national level.

Provisional agenda

source: http://www.unccd.int/science/announce/meeting-on-methodologies-data-needs.php

image: © Oleg Tsaruk, The batle with the nature, 1st UNCCD photo contest

One topic that was heavily discussed in both the speaker presentations and in the hallway conversations was Panton Principles. The Panton Principles are a set of best practices for open data, and were official launched at the symposium by Cameron Neylon in the opening talk. Cameron Neylon, Peter Murray-Rust and John Wilbanks were all instrumental in crafting the Panton Principles and all three addressed them in their presentations. You can find links to video of the presentations below.

Though John Wilbanks did address the Panton Principles, he did so with the perspective of a bigger picture. John’s keynote summed up the history and the future goals of the Open Science movement. John said that the real goal is generative scienceand defined generative with a quote from Jonathan Zittrain:

“Generativity is a system’s capacity to produce unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions from broad and varied audiences.”

There are several excellent blog posts by people who attended the symposium.

Jean-Claude Bradley, one of the speakers, provides a personal perspective on the day, a brief summary of the presentations and his presentation slides on his blog Useful Chem.

Another speaker, Antony Williams blogged about how the generative science message in John Wilbanks’ keynote resonated powerfully with him and is very well-aligned with his motivation for ChemSpider. You can read Antony’s post and see his presentation slides on his ChemSpider blog.

There were quite a few science librarians in attendance at the symposium. Alison Aldrich sums up the presentations from a librarian’s point of view on her blog Dragonfly. Leave it to a librarian to provide clear, concise summaries of all the presentations along with links to supplemental information.

If you weren’t able to attend in person – or if you were but just need a refresher on the overwhelming amount of excited ideas that were discussed – you will really appreciate the detailed notes taken by Brian Glanz of the Open Science Foundation. Brian diligently took notes on his pad throughout the day and has posted them in an open blog on the Open Science Foundation website.

The Microsoft Research team was our gracious host. In addition to providing us with a wonderful space for the event, keeping everyone well fed and caffeinated, and giving out copies of the new CC-licensed book The Fourth Paradigm, they did an excellent job of capturing the presentations on video. The video is now live and can be watched online at:

Session 1 Featuring Lisa Green, Lee Dirks, Stewart Tansley & Kris Tolle, Cameron Neylon and Jean-Claude Bradley

Session 2 Featuring Antony Williams and Peter Murray-Rust

Session 3 Featuring Heather Joseph and Stephen Friend

Session 4 Featuring Peter Binfield and John Wilbanks

The videos are a wonderful resource – for those of us who were there as well as the people who were not able to be physically present at the symposium. I know that I will be watching them more than once in the near future. The ideas presented at Science Commons Symposium are among the most important in science; they are the ideas that will shape the future of science.

The Conference provides a unique opportunity to resurface the discussion and debate on Commons and bring experience and evidence from across the world to show that Commons are not a relic of the past, but play a strategic role in maintaining ecological health, reducing poverty, and improving collective action. By placing the Conference agenda in the ongoing discussions around conservation, local governance, social exclusion and human rights, agrarian distress and rural livelihoods, and by pitching it at the interface of policy, research and practice, the aim is to bring practitioners, scholars and decision makers to a common meeting ground so as to enrich the collective understanding on common property resources and identify areas and measures to inform policy and programmatic action as well as guide future research.

13th Biennial Conference of IASC

IASC2011 will take a critical look at the interface between human and natural systems, Commons in particular, to build on our understanding on the elements and interconnectedness that sustain life, collective action and our future. The Conference will contribute rich lessons and principles for managing local, complex, as well as Global Commons such as international arrangements to respond to climate change.
We invite anyone interested or working on the issues relating to commons to participate in the Conference. We encourage scholars and practitioners to submit abstracts for panels, individual papers, posters, videos. The panels, papers, poster and video abstracts should be submitted to the Conference Committee through the online submission process.
The Conference will deal with physical common resources such as Forests, Grazing Resources, Protected Areas, Water Resources, Fisheries, Coastal Commons, Lagoon Commons, Irrigation Systems, Livestock and Commons and New Commons such as Information Commons, Cultural Commons, Genetic Resources, Patents, Climate, etc.

Conference Chair: Nitin Desai

Mr. Desai is presently a Member of the Prime Minister ’s Council on Climate Change, set-up to coordinate national action plans for assessment, adaptation and mitigation of climate change and advise the Government on pro-active measures that can be taken by it to deal with the challenge of climate change. Mr. Desai was the Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (1992 Rio Earth Summit) from 1990-1993. During the period, he coordinated the work of the Secretariat related to the development of Agenda 21, the principal programmatic outcome of the Conference. Later, in 2001 Mr. Desai acted as the Secretary-General of the World Summit on Sustainable Development (2002 Johannesburg Summit).
After his retirement from the United Nations, Mr. Desai continues to be a Special Adviser to the Secretary General for the World Summit on the Information Society. He is also an Honorary Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science, the convener of one of the tracks in the Helsinki Process on Globalisation and Democracy and a member of the Board of Governors of Foundation for Ecological Security (FES).

Conference Co Chair: Jagdeesh Puppala

Jagdeesh has been the Chief Executive of the Foundation for Ecological Security (FES) since its setting up in 2001. Essentially a practitioner, his entire professional life beginning in 1986 has been centered around the management of natural resources, particularly common property resources. Issues of interest and involvement include conservation of forests and water, political ecology, land use policies, dryland ecology and decentralised governance of natural resources.

For more information see: http://iasc2011.fes.org.in/

Tentative program 
A tentative program is now available on this home page. We are glad to introduce a program containing many relevant and interesting speakers, and we believe this program will facilitate the development of good recommendations on post 2010 biodiversity targets. Opening addresses will be made by Erik Solheim, the Norwegian Minister of Environment and International Development Co-operation, Angela Cropper, Deputy Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and Ahmed Djoghlaf, Executive Secretary of the CBD. The closing address will be made by the Norwegian Minister of Finance, Sigbjørn Johnsen.

Tentative program (22.12.2009)

For information about the program click here

Information about background and earlier conferences

Participation
On the 23rd of October a formal invitation went out through diplomatic channels from Erik Solheim, the Norwegian Minister of Environment and International Development Co-operation to all member States of the United Nations. In addition, the invitation was sent directly to relevant UN agencies and international and non-governmental organizations. A copy was sent to the National Focal Points for CBD.

In addition, invitations will be sent directly to relevant UN agencies and international and non-governmental organizations.

Conference invitation to countries (sent October 23rd 2009)

Information note

It should be noted that participation at the conference will be by invitation only, and that participation will be limited to a maximum of 300 participants.

The conference language is English.

The Norwegian government is prepared to provide travel support for participants from countries eligible for such support according to criteria under the CBD.

For more practical information regarding participation click here