Micro B3 Stakeholder Workshop

At the Crossroads of Open Access to Data with Access and Benefit-Sharing Requirements –Promoting Pre-competitive Scientific Research

Background:

Micro B3’s work package 8 is now organizing a stakeholder workshop which will approach the issue of access and benefit-sharing (ABS) under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and its Nagoya Protocol from an open access-based data-management view point. This broader approach to the issue of ABS is timely because

1. the Nagoya Protocol will enter into force in autumn 2014,
2. large amounts of data, easy to be generated due to the revolution in high-throughput sequencing, are creating novel Omics databases, and
3. wider access to gene synthesis enables the reverse path from data back to genetic material.

The objectives of this Micro B3 stakeholder workshop are to inform and discuss:

• different scenarios of data flow associated with genetic material that was accessed under the scope of the Nagoya Protocol,
• the importance of open access to marine, environmental and genomics data for pre-competitive research in order to facilitate dissemination and further analysis of such data and to fully unlock its scientific potential,
• the need for clear regulation of data access and transfer, as well as related benefit-sharing in ABS agreements at the point of access to genetic material, as well as
• possible options for managing data further downstream in the research and development chain in line with international obligations established by the Nagoya Protocol.

Workshop Output:

Based on the results of this stakeholder workshop, IUCN, in collaboration with other Micro B3 partners, will prepare a policy brief on the crossroads of open access to data with ABS, as well as on ways to promote pre-competitive scientific research in line with Article 8(a) of the Nagoya Protocol.

The target audience comprises ABS policy-makers, as well as representatives from research funding agencies and the scientific community, including from marine and genomic databases and microbial culture collections.

The lead party is IUCN http://www.microb3.eu/partners/scientific. Participation in the workshop is upon invitation by the organizers, only.