Open Access

By Victor Nzomo In the midst of two decades of TRIPS and three decades of openness, more than 400 delegates from over 50 countries converged...

Hani Morsi, an Open AIR Post-Doctoral fellow at the Access to Knowledge for Development Center (A2K4D) in Cairo, gave a seminar last week entitled “Beyond openness: Investigating the success factors of open approaches to collaboration and innovation”. This was part of the Brown Bag seminar series of AUC’s School of Business.

Authored by: Jeremy de Beer Abstract: Governments have long been interested in making intellectual property (IP) policy based on sound evidence. There is a large...

By Chidi Oguamanam and Sarah O’Flaherty The State of Affairs As the vaccination rate rises in Canada and other developed nations, developing countries globally continue to record an...

Agricultural data is a vital resource in the effort to address food insecurity. This data is used across the food-production chain. For example, farmers rely on agricultural data to decide when to plant crops, scientists use data to conduct research on pests and design disease resistant plants, and governments make policy based on land use data. As the value of agricultural data is understood, there is a growing call for governments and firms to open their agricultural data.

Edited by: Chidi Oguamanam. When the oral history of a medicinal plant as a genetic resource is used to develop a blockbuster drug, how is the contribution of Indigenous Peoples recognized in research and commercialization? What other ethical, legal, and policy issues come into play? Is it accurate for countries to self-identify as users or providers of genetic resources?

By Helen Chuma-Okoro and Nicole Tumaine This is part two of Helen Chuma-Okoro and Nicole Tumaine’s blog post on the insights retained from 2018 conferences,...

In the recently concluded ‘African Ministerial Conference: Intellectual Property for an Emerging Africa’ organized in part by WIPO (here), one cannot help but think that all roads leading to creativity and innovation are paved with intellectual property (IP) laws and institutions. Put differently, the level of creativity and innovation in a society is dependent solely on how we tinker with and enforce IP laws. This ‘IP parochialism’, as I call it, is manifest in the conference program. Of course, the response would be that the conference was solely about IP and as such there was no need to look beyond IP. This is an erroneous view.

By Meghan Blom Open AIR aims to understand how open collaborative innovation can help businesses scale up and seize the opportunities of the global knowledge economy....

By Eashan Karnik, cross-posted from Smart Prosperity Institute The need to adopt clean energy technologies is a pressing issue not just in Canada, but internationally...