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PART ONE: SETTING THE STAGE
Pages 3-16

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From page 4...
... American and European researchers, and very recently researchers in the Middle East, have undertaken initiatives to promote data sharing with the developing world, for example, the sharing of remotely sensed environmental data. Also, there are similar examples from the United Nations organizations, such as the World Health Organization (WHO)
From page 5...
... When data have been developed well, and then made available, this can make a huge difference in the lives of people or the economy of a developing country. For example, radar images from space were developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the radar imager flew on the space shuttle for the first time in November 1981.
From page 6...
... 6 THE CASE FOR INTERNATIONAL SHARING OF SCIENTIFIC DATA In my view, therefore, scientists ought to continue to campaign and lobby governments to make more data freely and easily available, and only classify documents that raise legitimate national security concerns. As the three examples that I have described illustrate, the sharing of scientific data can produce a great deal of good, particularly in the developing world.
From page 7...
... mapping. I am a professor of organic chemistry, and I have 12 superconducting nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometers in my center, from where I am speaking now.
From page 8...
... What is the roadmap for development -- a national vision, strategy, and action plan? The cabinet asked me to prepare a comprehensive plan to transition to a knowledge economy.
From page 9...
... There were interactions with thousands of scientists and engineers and economists within the country and across the world -- our own diaspora, other specialists, government planners, people in different ministries, people in the provincial and federal governments, and people involved in different organizations. After doing a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats analysis and identifying the specific strategy, we came forward with a very clear and crisp action plan.
From page 10...
... Perhaps the most dramatic step we took was to persuade the government to completely change the salary structures and make the salaries of professors in universities five times the salaries of federal ministers in the government. We introduced a new tenure-track system; however, we linked this to performance.
From page 11...
... Credit: Higher Education Commission for Pakistan's National Digital Library Program There are 75,000 e-contents, whether it is Springer or McGraw-Hill or the ISI Web of Science. We also introduced a search engine, SciFinder Scholar.
From page 12...
... When a massive earthquake occurred in the north of the country, the telemedicine program proved invaluable, because we could deploy remote services to the affected regions in a timely fashion. More than 4,000 teleconsultations have been held and this continues to grow.
From page 13...
... [7 years] Number Number Agriculture & Veterinary Sciences 363 450 Biological & Medical Sciences 589 601 Engineering & Technology 14 131 Business Education 11 58 Physical Sciences 688 677 Social Sciences 899 739 Arts & Humanities 663 377 Honorary 54 4 Total 3,281 3,037 SOURCE: From the speaker's presentation at the symposium.Credit: Higher Education Commission for Pakistan's National Digital Library However, numbers without quality can do more damage than good.
From page 14...
... 14 THE CASE FOR INTERNATIONAL SHARING OF SCIENTIFIC DATA When I came to Pakistan after 9 years at Cambridge University, I dreamed that I would try to set up a center in Pakistan that would be so good that students from the West would come to study here. In my center here in Karachi, we have 350 students doing Ph.D.s in organic chemistry, biochemistry, pharmacology, and other related areas.
From page 15...
... Since 2005, the Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge has quite dramatically changed the volume of publications that it accesses from developing countries, which is a very important change. For example, the number of South African journals that are indexed has gone up nearly threefold.
From page 16...
... I took a very strong stand and wrote a number of articles in national newspapers. I went to the Supreme Court last week, and the decision from the Supreme Court of Pakistan was that the Higher Education Commission is protected under the constitution.


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