Centre researchers in the Law Team at The University of Queensland have conducted a systematic appraisal of the problems facing researchers within the Centre and in the plant sciences at large.
In 2022 the team talked to plant scientists, staff at herbaria, gene banks and botanical gardens to better understand some of the legal issues they face. Based on the conversations, they began to produce a taxonomy of problems relating to access to genetic resources, understanding the legal implications for the use of traditional Indigenous knowledge, and the potential role of intellectual property in the protection of the Centre’s outputs.
As a start to addressing these problems, the team produced a series of 32 legal fact sheets that are freely available on the Centre website. Covering topics from Intellectual Property, Plant Breeder’s Rights, the Nagoya Protocol, Wild Harvesting and beyond the fact sheets provide information to assist researchers to understand their legal rights and obligations in a general sense.
The legal fact sheets are helping the Centre to start broader conversations around several questions, including:
- How will the objectives of the Centre be best served by seeking, or not seeking intellectual property protection?
- How can we raise awareness of the form and function of intellectual property to ensure that the Centre maximises the benefits of its use but minimise the disadvantages?
- How do we deal with the shift to computational and information-based research and dematerialised research outputs such as sequence information?
- How can we ensure that the Centre’s relationships with partners, stakeholders, participants, and indigenous communities are productive but also fair and equitable?
