A panel deciding what benefits California taxpayers will receive from their $3 billion investment in stem cell research agreed Friday to remove a discovery-sharing requirement that the biotech industry vigorously opposed. Biotech leaders had argued that being forced to freely share their patented inventions with California research institutions could stymie stem cell research by removing financial incentives for companies to get involved.
"We do not want to hurt this industry," agreed Jeff Sheehy, a member of the intellectual property task force of the state’s stem cell agency. "We have a policy that industry has told us will not work for them."...
[John] Simpson of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights said the policy should not have been eliminated. "I’m disappointed that they just yanked this," he said. "I think it needed to be tweaked. "This was too quick of a cave-in to biotech’s concerns."
The task force decided to retain a policy requiring that universities return to the state 25 percent of the royalties they receive in excess of $500,000 from licensing an invention....Before a company makes a product available to the public, it would have to have a plan in place to provide access for uninsured California residents. Therapies purchased with public funds would have to be provided at prices no higher than the federal Medicaid price. The stem cell agency would have "march in rights" to intervene if a company fails to follow its access policy or make its therapy available for public use. To ensure information is disseminated broadly, within 60 days of publication of research in a scientific journal, investigators must write a 500-word summary in lay person’s language to be posted on the stem cell agency’s Web site.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/18/2006 10:52:00 PM.
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.
