Initiatives

“Understanding Animal Experimentation” (Tierversuche verstehen) is a German science initiative that is coordinated by the Alliance of Science Organisations in Germany. It provides comprehensive, up-to-date and fact-based information on animal experimentation at publicly funded research institutions. Biomedical research directly serves to clarify fundamental processes in organisms and helps develop new methods to prevent, diagnose and treat illnesses such as cancer, diabetes, AIDS and Alzheimer’s in both humans and animals.

The initiative provides insights into the need for responsible animal experimentation, i.e. consistently striking a balance between the protection and welfare of the animal with the importance of scientific knowledge for human beings. But responsible action also includes developing and applying alternative and complementary methods.

The initiative “Understanding Animal Experimentation” promotes dialogue between science and the public. The communication supported by science organisations and professional associations provides reliable data and facts on animal experimentation and seeks to increasing transparency surrounding the motivation and circumstances behind such experiments. Our aim is to contribute to an objective discussion of animal experimentation.

Providing researchers with the best possible information infrastructure they need to conduct their research – this is the guiding principle behind the priority initiative “Digital Information”, which was established in 2008 by the Alliance of Science Organisations in Germany. Through this Alliance initiative, science organisations declare their willingness to coordinate their fundamental political and professional decisions in the field of digital information, pool the resources used for this purpose and provide further funding where necessary. In doing so, they also affirm their desire and aspiration to shape the digital transformation in science and create a basis for joint action.

In the years 2018 to 2022, the Alliance initiative is addressing new forms of digitalisation. Since the transformation from analogue media to digital objects is well advanced, genuinely digital phenomena now have a crucial role to play. These include cross-border networking of research and teaching on digital platforms, new forms of digital publication in science and its evaluation as a form of research output, machine analysis and interpretation of large amounts of research data, and the importance of good research practice in the digital age. The initiative is currently preparing for another period of cooperation.

The German Rectors’ Conference was commissioned by the Alliance of Science Organisations in Germany to launch the project DEAL to negotiate nationwide transformative “Publish and Read” agreements with the major commercial publishers of academic journals on behalf of all German academic institutions, including universities, universities of applied sciences and research institutions as well as state and regional libraries.

The negotiation goals of the project DEAL are as follows:

• All publications by authors at German institutions are to be automatically set to open access (CC-BY, incl. peer review).
• The DEAL institutions are to have permanent full-text access to the entire title portfolio (e-journals) of the selected publishers.
• Appropriate pricing according to a simple, future-oriented calculation model based on the volume of publications (“Publish & Read Model”).

“Science, research and teaching shall be free” – this is stated in Article 5 of the German Basic Law which came into force in 1949. To mark the anniversary of this constitutional principle in 2019, German academia takes the opportunity to debate the opportunities and responsibilities involved in such freedom as well as looking at the ways in which it comes under threat. The campaign Freiheit ist unser System. Gemeinsam für die Wissenschaft (“Freedom is our system. Together for science”) is an Alliance of Science Organisations’ initiative dedicated to promoting independence in research and teaching and comprises a series of events, speeches, debates and opinion pieces throughout 2019 in which the science system is subjected to critical scrutiny and attention is drawn to instances in which academic freedom comes under global threat.

The Alliance campaign, initiated by the Max Planck Society, sends out a message in support of freedom in research and teaching against the restrictions and exertion of influence that are gaining ground in many places.