WIPO Launches On-line Tool to Facilitate Access to Targeted Scientific Information

Geneva, July 23, 2009
PR/2009/595

A new public-private partnership which aims to provide industrial property offices, universities and research institutes in least developed countries with free access and industrial property offices in certain developing countries with low cost access to selected online scientific and technical journals was launched at WIPO’s headquarters on July 23, 2009.

The Access to Research for Development and Innovation (aRDi) program was rolled out by WIPO in partnership with various prominent science and technology publishers including the American Institute of Physics, Elsevier, John Wiley & Sons, National Academy of Sciences, Oxford University Press, Royal Society of Chemistry, Sage Publications, Springer Science+Business Media, and Taylor & Francis. The World Health Organization (WHO), Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and UN Environment Programme (UNEP) provided advice and expertise gained from their similar programmes offering access to journals in their respective fields of activity.

The aRDi program will support developing countries in realizing their creative potential and facilitate their integration into the global knowledge economy in line with the objectives of WIPO’s Development Agenda. A key recommendation of the WIPO Development Agenda, which seeks to integrate the development dimension into the IP system and WIPO’s activities, calls on WIPO to facilitate “national offices of developing countries, especially LDCs, as well as their regional and sub-regional intellectual property organizations to access specialized databases for the purposes of patent searches.”

The project was launched by WIPO Director General Francis Gurry at the High Level Forum on the Strategic Use of Intellectual Property for Prosperity and Development, which is bringing together on July 23 and 24, 2009 ministers and senior officials from LDCs to explore practical approaches to IP policy implementation for wealth creation and development in these countries.

Mr. Gurry said “WIPO is extremely pleased to launch the aRDi programme, a new public-private partnership with major global scientific and technical publishers and with the support of our sister UN agencies WHO, FAO and UNEP, as well as the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers.” He added that “Access to the knowledge contained in scientific and technical literature is critical to the innovation process. This complements the valuable access to technical information contained in patent documents, which WIPO’s PATENTSCOPE® search service already provides.” Mr. Gurry stressed that practical programs which enabled developing and least developed countries to access and exploit such information effectively were an important priority for WIPO.

“The International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM), together with the International Publishers Association, is very happy to work with WIPO as it strives to promote its vision of development through local innovation,” said Ms. Jayne Marks, STM Chair and Sage Publications Vice President & Editorial Director. She added “In the new aRDi programme local innovators will be given free or very low cost access to a specially designated range of key publications. aRDi fits well with “Research4Life,” three well established UN agency sponsored programmes in which publishers provide similar access to original research in health, agriculture and environmental sciences. These programmes have all been set in the timeline of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, and the publishers look forward to working closely with WIPO as it works to help the achievement of the MDGs.”

For more information, please contact the News and Media Division at WIPO:

Tel: (+41 22) 338 81 61 / 338 72 24
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