According to an article by Megan Olivie in today's Toronto Star, Ontario is contributing about $4.7 million to the lab of open access researcher Aled Edwards, leader of one of the world's largest public-private partnerships in basic research, the International Structural Genomics Consortium, a not-for-profit organization run out of the Universities of Toronto and Oxford and Stockholm's Karolinska Institutet – is among the world's largest public-private partnerships in basic research. More than a hundred labs cooperate with the consortium, which also receives funding from the major pharmaceutical companies. By cooperating at the basic research stage, everyone benefits from advances in discovery - faster discovery of new cures and treatments benefits us all, while new drugs mean new business for the pharmaceuticals.
Excerpt:
That so-called "big pharma" has funnelled money into the consortium, even during a recession, shows how seriously it is considering the open access philosophy, says Roderick McInnes, scientific director of the Institute of Genetics at the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, which has funded the Structural Genomics Consortium from the beginning...this is a Canadian success story.
This is another illustration that open access is Good for Business, and another example of Canadian Leadership in the Open Access Movement.
Thanks to Leslie Chan.
