ALLEA statement released: The Ownership and Protection of Multinational Inventions

The ALLEA Permanent Working Group Intellectual Property Rights (PWGIPR) released a statement today titled “The Ownership and Protection of Multinational Inventions – in Particular Inventions Resulting from Publicly Funded Research”.

The statement responds to the increase of multinational inventions resulting from international cooperation in research and development and the implications for the legal framework under which those inventions are managed and protected. The expert group calls for adopting more harmonised legal instruments at the European level with respect to the choice of law(s) governing inventorship. This harmonisation is necessary to reduce legal uncertainty and raise efficiency in multinational research and development.

The increasing internationalisation of research and development has led to more inventions as the outcome of such cooperation. The EU is supportive of these developments and has set up rules to administer this internationalisation. However, neither Regulation (EU) 1290/2013 nor any other legislative measure provides for harmonisation with national law on inventorship, assignment, and patent filing requirements for multinational inventions.

The ALLEA Permanent Working Group Intellectual Property Rights warns that this legal complexity hampers efficiency in the research and development area and leads to legal uncertainty with respect to the choice of law(s) governing inventorship.

In their statement, the ALLEA experts observe the lack of harmonisation and invite the European Commission to (i) analyse the effect of diverging national rules on inventorship, assignment, and patent filing requirements on research and development in the EU, (ii) assess the appropriate scope and substance of legislative measures and remedies at EU level, and (iii) initiate discussions with regard to the prospect and feasibility of adopting harmonised legal instruments on the international level.

The ALLEA Permanent Working Group Intellectual Property Rights combines decades of highly specialised expertise in the European legal framework for patents and copyrights. Among other topics, the expert group focuses on the legal challenges of Intellectual Property Rights and the EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation. Previous related statements include inter alia “On the Status of the Patent System of the European Union” published in 2015.

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Ethical Aspects of Open Access Workshop: A Windy Road

The ALLEA Permanent Working Group on Science & Ethics organised the workshop Ethical Aspects of Open Access: A Windy Road on 1 February 2018, hosted by the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts in Brussels.

For anyone involved in academia, Open Access has become a topic hard to miss. The European Commission’s Open Science agenda as well as funding and research organisations alike encourage the open publication of research articles on an ever greater scale and with good reason as there is little doubt that publicly funded research should be as open as possible to the public.

Though, after around 15 years since the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge, one of the most influential statements on Open Access, the research community must attest that several unintended consequences and ethical conundrums have marred the full-scale implementation of Open Access in the European Research Area.

ALLEA workshop

To identify some of these issues and to discuss possible solutions, the ALLEA Permanent Working Group on Science & Ethics organised the workshop Ethical Aspects of Open Access: A Windy Road on 1 February 2018, hosted by the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts in Brussels. The event was attended by around 80 participants from across Europe.

The speakers of the workshop covered issues ranging from editorial responsibilities in the Open Access world to ways of identifying questionable and unethical publishers.

The speakers of the workshop covered issues ranging from editorial responsibilities in the Open Access world to ways of identifying questionable and unethical publishers. Further issues that were addressed were the need to balance transparency with resilience and the effects of Open Access on the assessments of research performance. Relevant organisations such as the Committee on Publication Ethics, the Directory of Open Access Journals, and EMBO were among the represented organisations.

The workshop was concluded with a panel debate, bringing together representatives from European academies, young academies, funding organisations, European universities, and the European Research Council.

The presentations of the workshop are available on the ALLEA website here.

A more detailed report of the workshop will be published in due course.