WHO: Concerns over draft text on R&D financing and coordination | Don't trade our lives away
peter.suber's bookmarks 2013-05-27
Summary:
"The CEWG [World Health Organisation’s Consultative Expert Working Group] Report recommended certain guiding principles for R&D. It recommends an open knowledge innovation approach to R&D . It further defines this approach and states: “We characterise these as ‘open knowledge innovation’, and define this as research and innovation that generate the knowledge which is free to use without legal or contractual restrictions”. Towards this end, it recommends three R&D models, viz. open approaches to R&D and innovation, milestone prizes, equitable licenses and patent pools. Apart from the cost effectiveness of R&D, the CEWG finds these mechanisms can “also help to secure delinkage, inter alia, by encouraging competitive pricing of end-products”. OP 4(4) is silent on whether the demonstration projects will be guided by this new approach to R&D and innovation. The key question is whether the implementation of demonstration of R&D projects would be guided by the business-as-usual mainstream R&D paradigm or the “open knowledge innovation” approach suggested by the CEWG...."