Nicoletta Dentico and Nathan Ford, The Courage to Change the Rules: A Proposal for an Essential Health R&D Treaty, PLoS Medicine, February 2005. Excerpt: 'In recent years, some important steps have been taken to improve access to existing treatments in the developing world by increasing generic competition. Yet there continues to be a tension between promoting access to lifesaving medicines as a human right and maintaining a global trade regime that seeks to finance health R&D by allowing monopolies to charge high prices. There is a growing demand from many quarters for a new international policy framework. A new international treaty on essential health R&D could provide a binding framework to redirect today's knowledge and scientific expertise to priority health needs. The treaty could help to cement new political commitments and coordinate complementary partnerships aimed at generating and rewarding health innovation as a global public good....Key Concepts of an R&D Treaty:...Open access: governments should require access to the compounds and tools that result from public research in order to stimulate follow-on innovation elsewhere....The idea is to shift the discourse from trade to health. The treaty --focussed directly on R&D rather than patent rights or drug prices-- would address the global management of publicly funded health R&D.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/22/2005 02:19:00 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.
