Global Scientific Research Commons Under the Nagoya Protocol: Governing Pools of Microbial Genetic Resources

A Review of Living Collections with Special Emphasis on Sustainability and Its Impact on Research Across Multiple Disciplines

“…To address the impact of international treaties, including the CBD and the Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit Sharing, 11 several organizations have developed networks to promote harmonization among collections. Beginning with the Global Biological Resource Center Network demonstration project 89 and culminating with the EU Microbial Research Resources Infrastructure, 90 and with national and regional collection networks under development in Belgium, Asia, Korea, Japan, South America, the European Union, and the United States 29 ( ), access to catalogs of well-characterized resources with documented provenance is at a level never before attained.…”

“… 9 , 10 Most living collections allow repurposing of holdings without the need for consent of the depositor, although some new uses may require benefit sharing under the Nagoya Protocol. 11 Changing legal or regulatory circumstances requires collections to address issues of sustainability and the overall trend is toward increased impact through implementing best practices for quality management, data sharing, and visibility of validated and authenticated materials. 12 Living collections are easily categorized into several classes ( Table 1 ).…”

Meeting report: 2nd workshop of the United States culture collection network (May 19–21, 2014, State College, PA, USA)

“…Further presentations during the second afternoon session emphasized the development of formal codes of conduct for exchange of microbe strains. The current version of the code of conduct for exchange, called TRUST (for TRransparent User-friendly System of Transfer for Science & Technology), is built upon the frameworks stated by the MOSAIIC standard [ 1 ] and establishes proper practices for management of rights under the Nagoya Protocol and by extension, the Convention on Biological Diversity [ 7 ]. Because these issues are ultimately dependent upon accurate and properly curated reference material, further discussion included the use of standards in managing collection materials.…”

The Challenges for Implementing the Nagoya Protocol in a Multi-Level Governance Context: Lessons from the Belgian Case

“…Moreover, the concurrent negotiations of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) Uruguay Round, which pushed for the strengthening of intellectual property rights, led developing countries to replace their common-heritage strategy by (re)claiming sovereign rights over their genetic resources [5]. While dealt with under the auspices of an environmental treaty, the adoption of the Protocol is thus not just about the environment but also about international equity as a crucial component of any environmental regime, as explicitly recognized since the Stockholm declaration of 1972 [6,7]. Never, since the negotiations of the Kyoto Protocol, has the subject of equity figured so prominently on the agenda of the international politics of the environment as during the tenth Conference of the Parties to the CBD, which led to the agreement of the Nagoya Protocol [8].…”