[F.M.Scherer] suggested that sections of the treaty imply a direction away from granting exclusive licenses and imply that this could harm translation. However agencies with a mandate to improve public health, such as National Institutes of Health and Wellcome Trust, are already using a range of different approaches to ensure that research discoveries are developed into treatments, only one of which is exclusive licensing. Our view is that a mixed approach is likely to be the most successful, but that new open access approaches should be encourage where appropriate. Recent evidence suggests that the selective creation of public research resources (e.g. human genome sequence), which are of wide utility to other researchers, stimulate research activity more than any lose of potential exclusivity. More widely, encouraging researchers to be more proactive in sharing their data and research results, under open access research initiatives, also appears beneficial.
(PS: Disclosure: I helped draft the OA provision (§13.1) of the Medical R&D Treaty. For more details, see the CPTech page on the treaty.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/22/2005 09:45:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
