OpenAIR

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Successful Lagos Conference on African IP Training

A NIALS/Open A.I.R. conference, looking at the state of African IP training, was held in Lagos on 20 November 2012. The meeting was entitled "Intellectual Property Capacity-Building for Development: The Role of Scholars". Open A.I.R. network members from Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon, Egypt and Canada were in attendance and gave presentations.

SA Research Team Members at Berlin 10 Conference

Open A.I.R. South Africa researchers Luci Abrahams of Wits University and Dr. Caroline Ncube of the University of Cape Town presented at the Berlin 10 Open Access Conference at Stellenbosch University on 7-8 November 2012.

Cairo's A2K4D Receives Grant for Harvard Collaboration

By Nagham El Houssamy, Open A.I.R. North Africa Hub Coordinator

The Access to Knowledge for Development Center (A2K4D) in Cairo has received a grant from the IDRC for joint research, with Harvard's Berkman Center, into the current state of the Arab "networked public sphere".

Collective Action for Global Knowlege Cooperation - Reflections from a Conference on the ‘Knowledge Commons’

By Balthas Seibold, Open A.I.R. Global Knowledge Cooperation Advisor

There is growing interest in the concept of the “knowledge commons”, and illustrative of the power of the concept was last week’s meeting in Belgium of a Thematic Conference on the Knowledge Commons.

The Open A.I.R. Project

The Open African Innovation Research and Training (Open A.I.R.) Project is investing in pan-African research, networking, capacity-building and policy engagement.

The project’s central aim is to investigate how intellectual property (IP) regimes can be harnessed in Africa to facilitate innovation through collaboration – and through making processes more participatory, knowledge more accessible, and benefits more widely shared. Interconnected, empirical case studies are now underway, exploring a range of research questions in countries across the continent.

The case studies are connected to six Open A.I.R. themes: copyrights, patents, trademarks, the WIPO development agenda, the traditional knowledge (TK) commons and IP from publicly funded research. At the same time, the project is conducting foresighting research to develop scenarios for the future of IP, collaboration/innovation and development in Africa. Later in the project, training, capacity-building and policy engagement activities will be rolled out, based on the case study and foresight findings.