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Collaborative and open innovation in the global limelight

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June was a hectic month. (That sounds like a parody of TS Eliot, but it really was a hectic month.) There is a lot to catch up with, so I will provide a series of posts, on a variety of topics. The general message seems to be that times are a-changing and that there is an increasing dynamic weight behind open access and open innovation approaches, particularly (but not only) for developing countries. With the major international organisations weighing in and with our new Minister of Higher Education joining the debate at UNESCO, these are indeed interesting times.

As a follow-on from the discussion of innovation and the SA IPR Act in recent blog postings, a  week-old UN debate is relevant, showing up yet again how much the SA legislation seems to be going against global trends.

The  Intellectual Property Watch Newsletter 0f 6 July reported that ‘innovation and technology will be key to emergence from the global economic crisis, according to speakers at a recent United Nations conference on innovation-based competitiveness. However, innovation should be collaborative and involve resources inside and outside companies and institutions.’
The “International Conference on Technological Readiness for Innovation-based Competitiveness” was organised by the UN Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) on 29-30 June. According to the IP Watch report, a number of speakers at this conference spoke about the need for collaborative innovation, or what  Paula Wasowska, director for Central and Eastern Europe market development for Cisco Systems, described as “connected innovation.”  Connected innovation requires cultural change to collaborative sharing of information, skills and perspectives within organisations and between them, the customers and the partners. “Innovation happens when people work together,” she is reported as saying.

“Innovation is moving from the in-house to the connected global market place, from the isolated individuals to collaborative environment…from proprietary control to open source, from single specialties to multidisciplinary perspective,” she said, and customers have become a critical force of competitive data as they are an invaluable force of information.

In general, this conference seemed to signal the  general acceptance of a shift from a competitive approach to innovation to a collaborative one, even where the mega-corporations like Microsoft and Intel are concerned. This collaboration takes place in and between companies and non-commercial organisations. The ethos, as Wasowska points out, is one of open sharing.

Even more striking was the statement by Claran McGinley, controller at the European Patent Office, that the patent system for ICTs is not working. The important thing about open innovation McGinley is reported as saying, is that “it is a team effort and crosses boundaries.”

The full IP Watch report can be found here.

The plan for innovation, IPR and public health is adopted at the WHO. How can this be reconciled with the IPR Act?

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It is not unusual in national policy for the right hand not to know what the left hand is doing. There is now a looming clash of priorities for the new Cabinet that goes to the very heart of the ‘better life for all’ mandate on which President Zuma’s government came to power. This  could cause embarrassment to a number of new ministers, in the DST, Higher Education, the DTI and Health. What is at stake is the way the South African government secures benefits from its investment in public research and how the country and its universities make research work for national development and the betterment of people’s lives.

What has happened is the IPR  Act, with its Draft regulations (due for final comment tomorrow) is on a collision course with a landmark resolution passed after years of debate at the  61st World Health Assembly at the World Health Authority. The South African delegation at the Assembly was headed by the Deputy Minister, Dr M. Sefularo and was attended by a delegation of 16 delegates and alternates from the Department of Health. The problem is a radical difference of views on how best to achieve benefit through innovation and intellectual property management.  The IPR Act requires universities and other publicly funded research organisations to secure intellectual property rights and patent as much research as possible, frowning upon open innovation and open source. The WHO, on the other hand promotes the idea of a collaborative world public health regime that uses patenting, but in a responsible way, and combines this with support for a number of open approaches to the shared dissemination of public health research.

The WHO resolution, passed on 22 May, finally agreed the way forward on the recommendations made to the Assembly by the Intergovernmental Working Group on Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property. The purpose of the Global Strategy and Plan of Action on Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property that has now been voted through, aims to  ‘secure.. an enhanced and sustainable basis for needs-driven, essential health research and development relevant to diseases that disproportionately affect developing countries, proposing clear objectives and priorities for research and development.’ While many people glaze over as soon as intellectual property is mentioned, it is clear that this is a vitally important issue for South Africa, quite literally a matter of life and death.
The recommendations of the Global Strategy contain a vision of the scientific endeavour that stresses global collaboration and the sharing of research information and data. This is also the way forward that President Barack Obama proposed in his speech to the National Academy of Sciences in the US a few months ago. The way forward that he sees for US  science is a vision of collaborative science for the public good:

In biomedicine… we can harness the historic convergence between life sciences and physical sciences that’s underway today; undertaking public projects — in the spirit of the Human Genome Project — to create data and capabilities that fuel discoveries in tens of thousands of laboratories; and identifying and overcoming scientific and bureaucratic barriers to rapidly translating scientific breakthroughs into diagnostics and therapeutics that serve patients.

The WHO plan of action, which the South African government is now called upon to implement, contains a number of provisions that provide for the use of open source development, open access to research publications and data, voluntary provision of access to drug leads, open licensing, and voluntary patent pools. This runs alongside a more traditional approach to the patenting of drug discoveries and vaccines, but with the proviso that there must be measures in place to ensure that patents are managed in such a way as to be appropriate to public health goals. This includes delinking the costs of research from the price of health products, so that they can be affordable in developing countries.

The burning question now is how this can be implemented – presumably by the Department of Health – when the IPR Act and its Regulations will effectively block the WHO provisions for sharing research results and using open licensing and open access for the benefit of public health delivery.

It would perhaps be appropriate for public health departments in our universities and their researchers to submit a request to the DST for the withdrawal of the Regulations for further consideration of the issues at stake by all the government departments that might be involved in this potentially embarrassing clash.

The Universiy of Pretoria adopts an open access mandate

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The University of Pretoria has become the first university in South Africa to adopt a mandate for open access deposit of publications by all academics. The senate of the University of Pretoria has unanimously approved an open access mandate for the university, which requires all academics to deposit digital copies of their publications in an open access archive. The policy will go into effect immediately and it is likely that UP scholars will see a substantial increase in the citation of their articles as a result. Other South African Universities will need to watch this space.

The wording of  the policy:

To assist the University of Pretoria in providing open access to scholarly articles resulting from research done at the University, supported by public funding, staff and students are required to:

  • submit peer-reviewed postprints* + the metadata of their articles to UPSpace, the University’s institutional repository, AND
  • give the University permission to make the content freely available and to take necessary steps to preserve files in perpetuity.

Postprints are to be submitted immediately upon acceptance for publication.

The University of Pretoria requires its researchers to comply with the policies of research funders such as the Wellcome Trust with regard to open access archiving. Postprints of these articles are not excluded from the UP mandate and should first be submitted as described in (1). Information on funders’ policies is available at http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/juliet/.

Access to the full text of articles will be subject to publisher permissions. Access will not be provided if permission is in doubt or not available. In such cases, an abstract will be made available for external internet searches to achieve maximum research visibility. Access to the full text will be suppressed for a period if such an embargo is prescribed by the publisher or funder.

The Open Scholarship Office will take responsibility for adhering to archiving policies of publishers and research funders, and managing the system’s embargo facility to delay public visibility to meet their requirements.

The University of Pretoria strongly recommends that transfer of copyright be avoided. Researchers are encouraged to negotiate copyright terms with publishers when the publisher does not allow archiving, reuse and sharing. This can be done by adding the official UP author addendum to a publishing contract.

The University of Pretoria encourages its authors to publish their research articles in open access journals that are accredited.

Starting in 2004 with an evaluation of appropriate repository software, and going live in 2006 with UPSpace, UP has established itself as a pioneer and a leader in the development and management of scholarly repositories in South Africa. The university at that time already had a thesis and dissertations repository, UPeTD, started in 2000 and expanded in 2004 with a mandate for the online deposit of theses and dissertations. The decision to expand this intervention to create a repository of research collections followed on the success that UPeTD had in profiling PhD students’ research, contributing to their career success and providing expanded readership for UP’s research output.

The project was resourced with the creation of a repository management team to oversee the implementation and ongoing management of UPSpace. There are now 7 896 full text items online, profiling the research output and publications of departments and individual academics, who have their own profiles within the repository, which can be linked to their CVs. The online publications can range from public scholarship and media articles to research papers and formal scholarly publications. The latter are collected in a sub-space of the broader collection, called openUP.

The initial reluctance of UP scholars to embrace open access has long been overcome and with Senate’s willingness to vote a mandate for deposit, it is clear that there is now top-level support for the initiative. It will be interesting to watch the impact that this has on UP’s research profile and scholarly reputation, which is likely to be enhanced by increased access. Research shows that online open access to research publications from developing countries considerably increases impact factors by a considerable margin.

Congratulations to UP for a bold initiative that puts in in the front rank among some of the leading universities in the world.

For an account of the setting up of the UP repositories, seeMartie van Deventer and Heila Pienaar, South Arfican Repositories: Brigding the knoweldge divides. Ariadne 55 2008

Genocide by Denial – An open access book from Uganda

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I have posted a blog in the PALM Africa blog site on an open access book from Fountain Publishers in Uganda, created as part of the PALM project. The timing of this publishing initiative is telling for us in South Africa, as the book deals with an issue that is directly releant to the Department of Science and Technology’s legislation and proposed Regulations aimed at forcing the commericlialisation of research. The impact of profit-driven commercialisation of public health research is an issue that this book takes apart in a searing critique.

From the PALM blog:

Fountain Publishers in Uganda has launched as its first open access book a powerful and moving indictment of the price in human lives that the global innovation system has extracted in sub-saharan Africa, written by the internationally respected AIDS specialist, Peter Mugyenyi. The book is Genocide by Denial: How profiteering from HIV/AIDS killed millions. This is the first demonstration project in the PALM Africa initiative and the response to the open acess book as well as its impact will be tracked and researched by the PALM team…

The book is a powerful indictment of a failed system, written with passion and clarity. from the AIDS disaster should help the world find a way of incorporating justice and human rights in business. It is glaringly clear that the ills of the present system need to be fixed. He appears to be vindicated by the fact that the WHO is now aligning itself with this approach. of – developing global policy. Mugyenyi’s book needs to be read by the South African bureaucrats who are trying to enforce widespread and rigid commercialization of public research. Mugyeni’s conclusion to his book puts the issues succinctly: The timing is impeccable, as the release of the open access version of the book coincides exactly with a breakthrough at the World Health Organisation, which has finally reached agreement on a global strategy and plan of action on public health, innovation and intellectual property. The WHO initiative, after long negotiations driven by developing countries, aims to address exactly the problem that Mugyenyi addresses – the excessively and unaffordably high prices of the drugs needed to treat neglected diseases in developing countries, driven by the global patenting system. In addition, it addresses the lack of adequate research on neglected diseases, also spawned by the profit-driven Intellectual propoerty regime supported by the developed world. Among the recommendations in the WHO  plan of action is government intervention to ensure voluntary sharing or research, open access publication repositories and open databases and compound libraries of medical research results. Thus Fountain’s engagement with open access publishing on a public health topic is right in line with – and ahead Laws that deny or delay access to life-saving and emergency drugs should be urgently addressed on the humanitarian principle of lives above profits, but without hurting the businesses. Innovation in the crucial area of human survival should not be entirely dependent on money-making and big business, but should primarily aim at the alleviation of all human suffering and saving lives as a basic minimum. This does not contradict fair trade. Business success and humanism are not incompatible It is just a big lie to suggest that humanity is too dim to find ways of rewarding innovation and discovery other than by holding the very weakest of our society at ransom. It is also untrue that the only way businesses can thrive is by cutthroat pursuit of profits under powerful and insensitive protective laws, irrespective of the misery caused and the trail of blood in their wake. Lessons learns more from thePALM blog, with further details of the book and its contents…

India Bayh-Dole legislation – a conspiracy theory?

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An article by Latha Jishnu in the Business Standard in India in mid 2008 provides a succinct account of the secretive progress of a piece of Bayh-Dole legislation in India. It sounds rather similar to our experience in South Africa. The Indian Act has subsequently been submitted to Parliament. The Bill was apparently being passed around the various ministries without much transparency when the text of the Bill was published on SpicyIP, an Oxford-based blog. Similar secrecy seems to have been reflected in the South African, process. Although the original draft of the SA Bill was published for comment and the universities’ criticisms of what many considered an unworkable system were noted, it was very difficult to lay hands on subsequent drafts. People I know trying to track the final draft only saw it after the Act was passed, although it appears from personal accounts that industry players were probably consulted in a workshop (in India there appears to have been a workshop for the chambers of commerce and industry).

Jishnu’s article concludes: Technology transfers can and do happen through many channels, and the diverse methods now in use would be restricted by the new law, says Abrol. Nistads is one of the one of the 38 institutes grouped under the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) whose chief, Samir Brahmachari, has been advocating the open source system (reported several times in this column) of collaborative, incentive-based research. What we need is some informed debate on what is India’s best interest at this particular stage instead of going for a wholesale import of an American system that could prove ineffectual. Otherwise, we could be headed for a nuclear deal in our science establishment — corrosive, divisive and ultimately ineffective. A series of SpicyIP blogs goes into the Indian legislation in some detail. It sounds much like what we are facing: The Indian bill, much like its US equivalent is premised on the assumption that intellectual property rights are the best way to drive innovation. The more IP, the better for innovation. There is plenty of literature that casts strong doubt on this lopsided view. Additionally, we’re seeing some great alternatives to the IP model emerging. Indeed, even as we speak, international scholars and activists are debating the merits of incentivising innovation through a variety of alternative means including “prizes”, “advance purchase contracts” etc. Closer home, Dr Samir K Brahmachari, Director General of CSIR, India’s premier R&D body, has been advocating an open source model in drug discovery. This is not to suggest that intellectual property rights (IPR’s) are bad in any way, but only to caution that IPR’s are but one way of incentivising innovation. Given that we are dealing with innovation and creativity, we must be open to trying out some of these alternatives i.e. we need to innovate within our innovation regimes! Particular stress is placed on the damaging effect that this legislation could have on access to medicines in India, given the above. Like our South African legislation, the draft Indian Bill also takes away the discretion of researchers and universities to make their own decisions on how best to make their research work for the public good. Both the decision to patent or a decision to use open approaches are subject to decision by a government office.

The Indian Acr aims to generate revenue through its provisions; however, SpicyIP argues, ‘In fact, the cost of operating a technology transfer office (TTO) often exceeds the money made from technology licensing. CSIR bears out this point well. While it generated approximately US$1 million in licensing revenues in 2004–2005, it spent more than twice that amount on filing patents.’

What is different in India is that there has been a strong activist movement, with a number of individuals and organisations tracking the progress of the Bill, unearthing copies of successive drafts, providing links to commentaries and analysis on Bayh-Dole in other countries  and generating debate. Useful for those who want to explore this issue in more depth.

But this particular budding conspiracy theorist, down on the southern tip of Africa, is asking why the secretive processes in both countries? And why does this legislation seem unstoppable? Is this a big-industry driven initiative and if, so given Obama’s view on scientific research development in last week’s speech, is this Reagon-style legislation what the US still wants?(1) And what of our new pro-poor government? What will our new Cabinet make of what they have been landed with?  Watch this space!

(1) It is to be noted that Professor Arti Rai, one of the authors of a very good article critical of  Bayh Dole’s relevance to developing countries is one of Obama’s IP advisors.