The international political process around Digital Sequence Information under the Convention on Biological Diversity and the 2018–2020 intersessional period
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Societal Impact Statement The international conservation of biological diversity is addressed under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and goals for the next decade will be discussed at the next Conference of the Parties. One issue under negotiation in the CBD is Digital Sequence Information (DSI), which has created tension between parties calling for preserving open access to DSI who also note its importance in addressing biodiversity and the UN Sustainable Development Goals and those parties calling for fair and equitable benefit sharing from DSI. This article introduces scientists to the current debate and political process on DSI within the CBD. Summary Most biologists take open access to sequence data for granted. This open system, while a hallmark of innovation and collaboration for the scientific community, is being called into question as some parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) assert that this access undermines their sovereign rights over their genetic resources and corresponding benefit sharing. The governance of sequence data and potentially other types of biological data, known in international policy circles as “Digital Sequence Information” (DSI), a placeholder term invented by negotiators, could be dramatically altered and ultimately change the way scientific research and publishing on sequence data is conducted. Many sequence‐using scientists are unfamiliar with the international political processes around DSI even though it could lead to irreversible decisions that might have significant impacts on research. This paper bridges that gap by providing an overview of the ongoing political process with a focus on the most recent studies on DSI commissioned by the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (SCBD) and what these studies forecast about the political debate. With this information in hand, the scientific community can hopefully better engage with the political process and proactively promote evidence‐based decisions or even solutions that can bridge the demand for benefit sharing with the scientific need for open access to DSI.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.037 | 0.048 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".