We invite participants of the combined 3rd Global Congress on IP and the Public Interest and Open A.I.R. Conference on Innovation and IP in Africa to submit their papers for a special issue of the African Journal for Science, Technology, Innovation and Development. The best papers presented and submitted at the Open A.I.R. Conference and Global Congress will be reviewed, and may be selected for publication.
The AJSTID (http://www.ajstid.com) is an interdisciplinary and refereed international journal on science, technology, innovation and development in Africa and other low-income countries. It has been established to highlight the crucial role of science, technology and innovation for development and to promote research on the contribution of knowledge creation and diffusion to development in Africa.
This issue will explore research questions at the nexus of intellectual property and development, an intriguing and significant research domain that offers numerous opportunities for substantial scholarly inquiry. It is widely accepted that IP regimes should be considered as forming part of a broader set of measures that are designed to optimize the development and utilization of knowledge.
The intent of this special issue is to provide a forum to advance our understanding of the research issues that lie at this nexus. The purpose of this issue is to contribute to the development of intellectual property (IP) policy in Africa and to present crucial findings from innovation research related to sustainable development. We now call for full research papers that may address, but are not limited to:
- The role of IP in development and innovation
- Technological Innovation and IP
- IP protection in developing and least developed countries
- Sub-Saharan Africa: Development of IP systems
- 10th year of the Doha Declaration and usage of TRIPS Flexibilities
- IP Policy: the past, present and the future
- IP v. pharmaceutical patents; improving access to HIV/AIDS medicines in Africa
Submissions will be refereed for relevance to the theme as well as academic rigour and originality. The papers should be no longer than 4000 – 7000 words with an abstract of 150 words; references should be sent in an Endnote file. High quality articles not deemed to be sufficiently relevant to the special issue may be considered for publication in a subsequent non-themed issue.
Please send your work no later than April 1st, 2014 to Dr. Burcu Kilic, bkilic@citizen.org and Prof. Mammo Muchie, MuchieM@tut.ac.za.
