European Commission
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European Commissioner Outlines Open Source Priorities
The Commissioner welcomed developments in open source throughout public administrations in Europe to seize the economic and innovative potential of open source. These include the Action Plan on Free Software and Digital Commons in France, the initiatives in Estonia, Spain and Italy, as well as the newly created Centre for Digital Sovereignty in Germany. According to the Commissioner, several factors are needed to use the potential of open source and to reach the political goals of the EU: nurturing a tech startup culture, utilising the digital single market for lean and sustainable tech industry, overcoming planned obsolescence, pooling the efforts of the EU’s Member States for technological independence and improving cybersecurity.
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5 Initiatives That Pushed the Free Software Envelope in Europe in 2016
The public sector tends to lag—some would say drag—behind the private sector when it comes to adopting new technologies. This is also true when it comes to adopting free software: Although companies widely see free technologies as a boon, government organizations often are still locked into proprietary software and work with closed standards. That said, some countries are making progress moving toward open source technologies...
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Bacteria That Resist 'Last Antibiotic' Found in UK
Bacteria that resist the most common antibiotic of last resort - colistin - have been discovered in the UK. Officials say the threat to human health is low, but is under ongoing review. Scientists warned the world was on the cusp of a post-antibiotic era when such resistance was discovered in China last month. Now checks have discovered the same resistance on three farms and in samples of human infections...
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EU Commission backs Open Access
The European Commission, which controls one of the world's largest science budgets, has backed calls for free access to publicly funded research... "Taxpayers should not have to pay twice for scientific research and they need seamless access to raw data," said Neelie Kroes, European Commission vice-president for the Digital Agenda.
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Europe Pledges Support for Open Source Government Solutions
Estonia has long been the digital envy of many European Union member states. An effective and open policy approach to digital government has yielded extraordinary results—from 90%+ uptake of electronic identification (E-ID) solutions to an open source e-government platform (X-Road) to meet the ever-growing expectations of IT-savvy citizens as well as other countries wanting to pool IT across borders. Perhaps the most significant development for open source supporters is the explicit recognition of open source software (OSS) as a key driver towards achieving ambitious governmental digitisation goals by 2020. Under the declaration, European goverments will...
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Europe Unveils Open Data Strategy, Hopes to See Economic Benefits
The European Commission unveiled Dec. 12 an Open Data Strategy for Europe--a revision to its 2003 directive on the re-use of public sector information that adds legislative, deployment and funding elements. Read More »
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European Commission Considering Leap into Open-Access Publishing
One of Europe’s biggest science spenders could soon branch out into publishing. The European Commission, which spends more than €10 billion annually on research, may follow two other big league funders, the Wellcome Trust and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and set up a “publishing platform” for the scientists it funds, in an attempt to accelerate the transition to open-access publishing in Europe...
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European Commission Embraces Open Access
The European Commission has announced its intention to make open access all research findings funded by Horizon 2020, its enormous, €80-billion (US$98-billion) research-funding programme for 2014–20. And it is urging member states to follow its lead. Read More »
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Experts Propose Global Targets for Cutting Antibiotic Use
Arguing that antimicrobial resistance (AMR) threatens to erase decades of progress in medicine, public health, and food security, a group of global health experts is urging the United Nations (UN) to set global targets for reduced antibiotic consumption. In a commentary published yesterday in Science, the authors argue that countries should aim to consume no more than the current median global level of antibiotics (8.54 defined daily doses per capita per year), an amount they say would reduce global antibiotic use by more than 17.5%...
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Forza open-source: Italian military to adopt LibreOffice
The Document Foundation’s Italian subsidiary, LibreItalia, said Wednesday that the Italian Ministry of Defense has agreed to adopt LibreOffice, the open-source productivity suite, in October, and that it will create its own online training courses for the new software by the end of 2016. The move was prompted, in part, by an Italian law that mandates the consideration of open-source alternatives to proprietary software for government use, which was originally passed in June 2012. LibreItalia and the military’s IT staff will release the educational material to the public at large under the Creative Commons license.
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Four Innovative Public-Private Consortia Leading the Design of the European Hybrid Cloud Platform for Science
Over the coming 10-15 years, the generation of vast amounts of data created by scientific research domains will create enormous challenges for capturing, managing, and processing of this data. Europe is well aware of this enormous challenge, and that is why the European Commission, in April this year, launched the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) initiative. The vision of the EOSC is to offer Europe’s 1.7 million researchers and 70 million science and technology professionals a virtual environment with open and seamless services for storage, management, analysis, and re-use of research data across borders and scientific disciplines free at the point of use...
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How "Open Source" Seed Producers from the U.S. to India Are Changing Global Food Production
Frank Morton has been breeding lettuce since the 1980s. His company offers 114 varieties, among them Outredgeous, which last year became the first plant that NASA astronauts grew and ate in space. For nearly 20 years, Morton’s work was limited only by his imagination and by how many different kinds of lettuce he could get his hands on. But in the early 2000s, he started noticing more and more lettuces were patented, meaning he would not be able to use them for breeding...
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In the UK, Open Access For All Publicly Funded Research by 2014
In one of the first moves to address these issues, the British government has unveiled plans to allow all publicly funded scientific research to be openly available by 2014... Read More »
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New UN-Backed Open-Source Tool Will Support Community Resilience-Building
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Programme (FAO) is teaming up with a coalition of partner agencies to develop a new data crunching tool to help national governments, development and relief organizations in their efforts to prevent and respond to crises such as animal diseases, plant pests and even conflict...
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Open access and the Academic Spring continues to blossom in the U.K.
The Academic Spring has seen four major developments in the last 32 hours. Read More »
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