Despite appeals from Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM), and other public interest groups, the Indian government has refused to modify a secretly drafted legislation that would govern the patenting of the results of publicly funded-research including publicly-funded medical research. As it currently stands, the Bill will harm access to medicines and impede the ability of scientists to conduct innovative research due to a lack of measures to protect the public interest.
The Indian government made only cosmetic changes to the legislation: the Bill still removes publicly-funded innovations from the public sphere and permits monopoly pricing on publicly-funded products without any effective safeguards to protect the public interest. The legislation is modeled on the US Bayh-Dole Act which has led to a proliferation of patenting activity and the creation of patent thickets. These create barriers to new innovative research and fail to protect the interests of American taxpayers who end up subsidizing the discovery of medicines they are often then unable to afford.
Proponents of the Indian Bill claim it will help India to commercialize publicly-funded research by encouraging research institutions to seek patents. As a UAEM white paper on a recent version of the bill argues, the law duplicates the failures of the US Bayh-Dole act and in fact offers even fewer access protections....
PS: See my comment from last week on a similar law in South Africa.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/17/2009 01:11:00 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.
