Digital Sequence Information, Open Access, and Sustainable Benefit Sharing: Scientific Input to International Policy Decisions

When?    Tuesday, March 10 (starting at 12:00 pm) until
               Wednesday, March 11, 2020 (ending at 16:00 pm)
Where?  NH Collection Brussels Centre
               Boulevard Adolphe Max 7, 1000 Brussels, Belgium

The Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) will meet in October 2020 in Kunming, China* to negotiate and define the international biodiversity targets for the next 10 years. In parallel to these discussions, the issue of benefit sharing from “Digital Sequence Information” (DSI) arising from Genetic Resources accessed under the Nagoya Protocol and CBD will also be negotiated. At stake in these negotiations for biologists is open access to sequence data via the large public databases. In order to avoid worst-case scenarios, science-based solutions for benefit sharing that do not endanger open access are urgently needed.
The European scientific community – academia as well as industry -- must engage and proactively develop interdisciplinary and fair solutions for all concerned in advance of these negotiations. The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) has funded an interdisciplinary project (WiLDSI) led by the Leibniz Institute DSMZ and the Leibniz Institute IPK Gatersleben to research DSI policy options and involve the scientific stakeholder community. Over the past six months, database, legal, scientific, and financing experts have come together to research possible solutions for DSI and have developed three scenarios that preserve open access but also enable monetary benefit sharing. Discussion and feasibility testing of these scenarios will be the focus of this workshop.
The workshop is jointly organized by the WiLDSI project and above institutes and co-hosted by the Horizon 2020 Project, European Virus Archive (EVA) and the EVA institutes DSMZ, National institute for Public Health and Environment (RVIM, Netherlands) and the Pasteur Institute (France).

*Please note that the meeting has now been postponed due to the recent COVID-19 pandemic.

Workshop agenda

Download the workshop agenda here.

Background document

Download the background document explaining the 3 scenarios here.

Workshop report

Download the workshop report here.