Advice To Obama On Global Health: Open Access

With US health resources, a “wide gap remains between what can be done with existing knowledge and what is actually being done” says a new report by the National Academies Institute of Medicine, which is meant to advise the Obama administration’s health policy. Some activities that it said need more attention involve intellectual property rights.

These activities include that “funders of global health research should require that all work supported by them will appear in public digital libraries, preferably at the time of publication and without constraints of copyright (through open access publishing)” and that publicly or philanthropically funded research institutions “should adopt patent policies and licensing practices that enable and encourage the development of technologies to create products for which traditional market forces are not sufficient, such as medicines, diagnostics, and therapeutics that primarily affect populations in low- and middle-income countries.”

The full report is available here.