Open Medicine

Open medicine (English open medicine ) designated medical projects in the spirit of Open Source and Open Culture and free access to medical research.

A corresponding model was proposed by the lawyers Stephen M. Maurer and Arti Rai and the pharmaceutical researcher Andrej Sali in the Public Library of Science (PLoS) on December 28, 2004. They find that tropical diseases such as malaria , sleeping sickness , dengue fever and river blindness kill several million people every year. For the pharmaceutical industry , however, the development of drugs is often not worthwhile because the Third World is not an economically attractive market. They therefore propose a collaboration between researchers on a voluntary basis, renouncing intellectual property, with a newly developed free license for the medical sector. The research costs are to be reduced through open access to a database for research results.

This idea resulted in the Tropical Disease Initiative , which is currently coordinating research into malaria and schistosomiasis (status: 2006).

In August 2004 a petition was sent to the US Congress calling for free and open access to the results of publicly funded medical research. It was signed by 25 Nobel Prize winners from the fields of chemistry , physiology and medicine .

In January 2006, a letter to the WHO criticized the fact that drugs were only affordable to varying degrees for the health systems of the countries ( “In the clinical setting we see the problem of affordable drugs to a greater or lesser extent in health care systems in all countries. " ). It was also criticized that industrial property rights can hinder the exchange of research results. The letter had been signed by 280 scientists from 50 countries.

Already in May 2001 which called German Medical Assembly the Bundestag on, "the biotechnology in the European Union directive 98/44 / EC on the protection inventions intended patentability not to transfer of components of the human body including genes into German law." A background were the partially successful patent applications from Celera , Incyte and other biotechnology companies. A counter-project is the publicly funded human genome project , the data of which is freely available in Project Gutenberg .

On April 13, 2006, a United Nations event entitled "Challenging Intellectual Property: Access to Knowledge Issues in Open Source and Medicine" took place in New York .

In 2005, the GNUmed group in Germany published the first version of a free program for managing patient data. A similar project for patient management in healthcare is FreeMED in the US.