IFLA is happy to join a consortium of eight partners working on the IP4OS project. This aims to find practical ways of ensuring that management of IP supports open science, bringing together different communities supporting researchers. 

European flag, and the text: Funded by the European UnionLibraries have long been active in supporting open access, as well as wider open science, recognising its potential to deliver both greater equity and higher research productivity.

At the same time, universities and research centres are also active in looking to promote the translation of research outputs into new businesses, and more broadly ensure that they have an impact in the world.

This has led to the development of programmes for managing intellectual property (IP), and associated policies and strategies. This raises the question of how IP is used, and in particular, how to make sure that plans here do not undermine work to maximise access to and use of materials and ideas.

The Intellectual Property for Open Science (IP4OS) project works to help ensure that IP management supports OS, both through more work to understand in depth the potential synergies and conflicts, and then to share good practices and ideas through libraries.

IFLA is part of the consortium, led by the University of Kiel, Germany, as the main library partner, alongside other universities and organisations focused on knolwedge transfer, training and communications.

We were therefore happy to join a kick-off meeting, held in Kiel, Germany, in order to discuss the different work packages of the project, and engage with other partners. Going forwards, we will, in particular, be bringing together insights from the library field to support the project, as well as working to ensure that libraries, not just in Europe but also globally, benefit from its outputs.

Watch our website for more, and follow the project on LinkedIn.