[Ip-health] KEI & UNU-MERIT Announce Award for Best Paper on Monetary Prizes for Medical R&D

[Karsten Gerloff]

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***KEI and UNU-MERIT Announce Award for Best Paper on Monetary
Prizes to Stimulate Medical R&D***


How can society ensure that knowledge goods, which are both costly
to create and potentially non-rival in use, can be shared freely?
There is little doubt that the current approach to rewarding the
development of new medicines or diagnostic devices has severe
deficiencies. Patent enforced monopolies often lead to high
prices. Critics also say that this system often fails to stimulate
investment in areas of public interest and priority.

The prize system provides an appealing solution by encouraging new
approaches to this thorny issue. If the incentive for innovation
can be divorced from the product's consumer price, then knowledge
goods =E2=80=94 including the R&D for a new medicine =E2=80=94 can be place=
d in
the public domain immediately, so that competition among suppliers
leads to low prices and greater access to new medical inventions.


Prizes can be implemented in many different ways. For donors and
governments in particular, prizes might offer an alternative to
marketing monopolies as the reward for successful investments in
R&D.


Knowledge Ecology International (KEI) and UNU-MERIT are calling
for papers on the use of monetary prizes as an alternative
mechanism to stimulate private investments in R&D.

Participation is open to anyone. Winners will be selected by a
jury of high-profile experts. The deadline for contributions is
February 15, 2008. Papers should be between four and 20 pages, and
must be submitted under a licence allowing unlimited distribution,
such as an appropriate Creative Commons licence.

Awards:
=09*Winning paper: EUR 1500.
=09*Two runners-up: EUR 500.-
=09*The three top-ranked papers will be published in the
=09Knowledge Ecology Studies journal.


Successful papers will deal with one or more of the following
questions:

1.Relation to exclusive rights of a patent: Should prizes be
considered as a voluntary or non-voluntary alternative to the
exclusive rights now associated with the patent system, or as a
complementary reward?

2.Valuation: How does one determine the size of prizes?

3.Push vs. pull: Where to use research grants ("push"), where to
prefer prizes ("pull") to finance drug development?

4.Sustainable financing: Where should the prize money come from,
and will the prospect of prizes be credible?

5.Follow-on innovation: How will prizes deal with the need for
incentives for follow-on innovation?

6.Transition: How can the transition from the current
monopoly-based system be organized?

For questions and submissions, please send email to Malini Aisola
and Karsten Gerloff <prizeprize@merit.unu.edu>. More information
will soon be available at http://ccp.merit.unu.edu/prizeprize


KEI <www.keionline.org> and UNU-MERIT <www.merit.unu.edu> are
looking forward to your contributions.

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UNU-MERIT                        <http://www.merit.unu.edu>
Researcher              Free Software & Access to Knowledge
Tel. +31 (0)43 38 84479  //  Keizer Karelplein 19
6211 TC Maastricht      //   The Netherlands
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