Applause broke out at the annual World Health Assembly Friday as agreement was reached at the end of a five-year process to devise a plan for boosting research and development on and access to drugs needed by developing countries. Now with the full assembly’s approval, the focus turns to five-year implementation and as-yet unclear ways to pay for it. ...
Agreement in committee was reached after a group of developing countries eager to discuss a possible treaty on biomedical R&D dropped a demand to include the WHO as a stakeholder in discussions about the treaty ...
The approved global strategy and plan of action on public health, innovation and intellectual property aims by 2015 to train over 500,000 R&D workers, improve research infrastructure, national capacity and technology transfer, and lead to numerous other outcomes such as creating 10 public access compound libraries and 35 new health products (vaccines, diagnostics and medicines). ...
The WHO legal counsel gave an opinion to the committee that dropping the WHO as a stakeholder would not prejudice the R&D treaty issue as it is addressed in a separate expert working group on financing to continue deliberations this year under a mandate from the 2008 assembly. Those proposals are still on the table and could go the assembly next year, the counsel said. It also would not prevent any member state from making any proposals to the Executive Board as is standard WHO process. ...
To accomplish all of the proposed activities was estimated by the secretariat to cost nearly $150 billion over the period of implementation. But several participants de-emphasised those estimates as hard to verify. ...
Meanwhile, NGOs Health Action International and IQsensato this week issued a proposed way for countries to monitor implementation of the strategy and action plan. The proposal is available here. ...
Comments. Background:
The World Health Assembly, the governing body for the World Health Organization, formally approved the Global Strategy and Plan of Action on Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property. The broad plan was drafted and revised through a working group over several years. The WHA had approved a draft plan last year, which did not include complete timeframes, progress indicators, estimated costs, and lists of stakeholders.
The plan includes an element directly related to OA, element 2.4(b), "strongly encouraging" publicly-funded researchers to self-archive. This element was watered down from a mandate in 2007.
The plan also suggests working on an R&D treaty. The draft treaty includes an OA mandate. The final version of the plan approved retains the reference to the treaty, but removes WHO from the stakeholders: i.e., WHO will not proceed with work on the treaty under the aegis of this plan. However, discussions on the treaty can proceed independently of WHO, and the treaty can continue to be discussed through other mechanisms at WHO (and in fact is already included in ongoing discussions on another topic). So the removal of WHO from the list of stakeholders in an R&D treaty doesn't kill the treaty, but it delays WHO's involvement indefinitely.
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 5/26/2009 02:38:00 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.
