Our work in the Law Team of the Centre started with a systematic appraisal of the problems facing researchers in the plant sciences at large and in the Centre. Over the year, we’ve talked to plant scientists, staff at herbaria, gene banks and botanical gardens to better understand some of the legal issues.
Based on the conversations we’ve had so far, we’ve started to produce a taxonomy of problems. The first set of issues we’ve encountered relate to access to genetic resources. Whether you need new organisms to serve as models or as sources of novel genomic materials, whether they are the vehicles for transformation or the source of genes that are being transformed, getting plants into the lab, in ways that satisfy not only the letter but also the spirit of the law, can be tricky. Secondly, understanding the legal implications for the use of traditional Indigenous knowledge is a difficult problem. Managing such relationships is especially hard in the context of the particularities of historical collections, and these present the third set of problems we have identified. Lastly, the issue of the potential role intellectual property should play in the protection of the Centre’s outputs is going to take some thinking.
In addressing these issues and problems we think it is necessary to face down a number of 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?
As part of the process of identifying these problems and the questions they raise, and as a start to address them so that the Centre’s researchers have the tools they need, we have produced a series of intellectual property fact sheets which are now available through the resource section of the Centre’s website. Alongside the fact sheets, we have also developed an aligned series of training sessions, which will kick off at the Centre’s Research Retreat next year. The last of these training sessions will be focused on the issues that interest Centre members and influence their work (please get in touch if there’s a specific problem you’re facing or a general class of problems you’ve encountered). These sessions will help to orientate researchers through a set of best practice guidelines that we are in the process of creating. Similarly, an international lecture series – People, Plants and the Law – currently underway, provides context for understanding the aims and purposes of our intellectual property work. Finally, next year we hope to expand the guidelines we have produced to include historical collections and Indigenous Knowledge.
It’s been a busy year but we’re looking forward to further discussions and continuing to work through the intellectual property issues raised by the Centre’s work.
Professor Brad Sherman
Chief Investigator, The University of Queensland
Dr Berris Charnley, Dr Hamish MacDonald and Dr Kamalesh Adhikari
Postdoctoral Researchers in the Law Team
