COMMUNIA Conference 2009: keynote speeches preview (3)

Jerome H. Reichman (Duke University Law School) will explain how today's research community in a Microbial field which is outgrowing its “small science” institutional structures, must increasingly come to terms with commoditizing pressures within developed economies.
These pressures restrict the conduct of public-sector research through strong intellectual property rights and related contractual restrictions on access to and use of materials, publications, and data. At the same time, restrictive policies in developing countries under the Convention on Biodiversity complicate research uses of microbial materials held in public repositories ex situ, and make it increasingly difficult to access the vast in situ materials these countries control.
These trends have led to a proliferation of diverse licensing strategies and techniques, which collectively have elevated the transaction costs and other barriers for even relatively simple cooperative research projects. In order to avoid such obstacles, the research community goal is to use liability rules to promote the exchange of materials: the redesigning a “soft” infrastructure able to better manage publicly funded research resources, without compromising downstream commercial applications and fruitful partnerships between the public and private sectors, or between developed and developing countries.

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