Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Saturday, May 27, 2006

Good WHA resolution could be better

Tove Iren S. Gerhardsen, Agreement Reached On IP And Public Health Resolution At WHO, IP Watch, May 27, 2006.

First the good news:

A technical group at the World Health Assembly today agreed on a resolution that will increase the worldwide research and development focus on diseases that disproportionately affect developing countries....The text of the resolution is not yet available but will be distributed at the meeting on 27 May by the World Health Organization (WHO)....

And then the bad news:

Participants said some language was removed due to overlaps from combining the two draft resolutions....Deleted language with no apparent overlap may have been removed because it was controversial. This might include...references to open access to public research such as the Human Genome Project and open access models in general. It might also include references to the public domain (“proper balance between intellectual property rights and the public domain”), and to the public interest (“imperative to reconcile the public interest in accessing the products and derived from new knowledge with the public interest in stimulating invention”), a global appeal from 2,500 scientists, and the importance of the WHO’s regional committees to include the CIPIH [Commission on Intellectual Property Rights, Innovation and Public Health] report in their agendas.

Comment. I understand going for the low-hanging fruit before the higher-hanging fruit, and not waiting for consensus on harder questions before resolving easier ones. We do it ourselves in the OA movement. But OA isn't an easily separable side-issue in the current WHA debate. Any serious attempt to accelerate R&D on diseases that affect developing countries has to reckon with the power of open access to help the cause and the power of toll access to hurt it.