Open Medicine
Open Medicine, German open medicine called medical projects in the spirit of Open Source and Open Culture and free access to medical research.
A similar model was proposed, among others, by the jurists Stephen M. Maurer and Arti Rai and Andrej Sali the pharmaceutical researchers in the Public Library of Science (PLoS ) of 28 December 2004. They note that tropical diseases such as malaria, sleeping sickness, dengue fever, or river blindness require several million deaths annually. For the pharmaceutical industry, however, the development of drugs is not worth much because the Third World did not constitute an economically attractive market. They therefore propose a collaboration of researchers voluntarily waiving the intellectual property with a newly developed free license for the medical sector. The search costs are to be reduced by open access to a database of research results.
From this idea emerged among others, the Tropical Disease Initiative, which at the time research for malaria and schistosomiasis co-ordinates (as of 2006).
In August 2004, a petition to the U.S. Congress sent that demanded the free and open access to the results of publicly funded medical research. She had been signed by 25 Nobel laureates in chemistry, physiology and medicine.
In January 2006, has been criticized in a letter to the WHO that drugs for the health systems of the countries were affordable only to varying degrees ( "In the clinical setting we see the trouble of affordable drugs to a Greater or lesser extent in health care systems in all countries. "). They also criticized that Intellectual property rights may hinder the exchange of research results. The letter was signed by 280 scientists from 50 countries.
Already in May 2001 invited the German Medical Assembly in the Bundestag, " not to convict in the European Union directive 98/44/EC, on the protection of biotechnological inventions provided patentability of elements of the human body including genes into German law. " A background were the partially successful patent applications the company Celera, Incyte and other biotechnology companies. A counter project is publicly funded Human Genome Project, the data in the Project Gutenberg are freely available.
On April 13, 2006 in New York, a United Nations event, entitled "Challenging Intellectual Property: Access to Knowledge Issues in Open Source and Medicine " instead.
The group GNUmed in Germany in 2005 published the first version of a free program for managing patient data. A similar project for patient management in health care is FreeMed in the USA.