ISSUE 41: MARCH-MAY 2006
network of research and training centres/programmes
FRONT PAGE | ARCHIVE |
Open source, open medicine take centre-stage at UNU symposium
Can an Intellectual Property regime designed to protect private interests be reformed to benefit everyone? What happens when governments promote free, open-source software? Should anyone control access to the human genome sequence?
These are some of the issues that were explored at a research symposium titled Challenging Intellectual Property: Access to Knowledge Issues in Open Source and Medicine that took place on April 13 at UN Headquarters in New York. The event was organized by the UNU Office in New York and UNU Maastricht Economic and social Research and training centre on Innovation and Technology (UNU-MERIT) in the Netherlands.
The symposium analysed the role of free/open source software and other collaborative models of knowledge production in economic development. It also assessed the effectiveness of several alternative global financing mechanisms that have been proposed to boost health research and development and broaden access to affordable drugs for the world’s poorest populations.
Speakers included:
- Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, Senior Researcher, UNU-MERIT;
- Louis-Dominique Ouédraogo, retiring Inspector, the UN Joint Inspection Unit;
- Tim Hubbard, Head of Human Genome Analysis, The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, UK;
- Tadao Takahashi, of the Centre for Stragegic Studies, Brazil.
A recent UNU-MERIT Policy
Brief on the role of Open Source and Open Standards in economic development similarly notes that:
"...Countries around the world, regardless of their wealth, are trying to bring citizens into the
information society and provide electronic access to government services. Many of them are considering open source software as a cost-effective means of doing so. Many more see an inherent injustice in requiring citizens and businesses to buy software from specific vendors in order to communicate with the government, and are looking at open standards - which allow different products from different producers, whether open source or proprietary software, to work together.”
Results from several Open Source studies at UNU-MERIT suggest that some countries and institutions have made
progress in adopting policies to promote competition among technology providers, and enhance public access to knowledge. In just four years, Extremadura – one of the poorest regions of Spain - successfully
created a free-software society. The model is now being replicated in other poor regions of Spain, as well as in Latin America.
The Symposium builds on the recent panel discussion on eGovernance and Free Software: How They are Changing Developing Countries. The event focused on the work of UNU International Institute on Software Technology (UNU-IIST) in building capacity in developing countries, and explored how software technology can enhance government services.
The new UNU-MERIT Access To Knowledge (A2K) Hub was launched during the event. The A2K Hub provides a central access point to UNU-MERIT’s work on free/open source software, intellectual property, biotechnology and access to medicine. It publishes regular updates on the research in progress and links to available publications and outputs. It also frames UNU-MERIT’s activities in a wider global context by reporting on events and projects in other UNU Centres and Programmes, and elsewhere.
© 2006 United Nations University