Patent offices in least developing countries have something to smile about now, with increased access to 150 online scientific journals by the end of this year, according to SciDevNet and this Patenting Lives blogpost.
The aRDi programme was launched by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) with partners in the publishing industry with the aim to increase the availability of scientific and technical information in developing countries. Its partners include Elsevier, Oxford Univ. Press, Springer, John Wiley, Nature, Sage, and Taylor&Francis.
The scheme will allow patent offices in the 50 least-developed countries to free access, and to an additional 57 developing countries to access at nominal cost, to designated journals. India does not qualify for such entitlement, for obvious reasons. Nevertheless, this kind of access is surely beneficial to establishing global standards in IP.
Tailpiece: For those of you who track developments in US Federal Courts, it may be interesting to read this note, which suggests that a new Firefox-only plugin may change the fate of millions of paid-only legal documents on PACER (the document-tracking system used by US FCs).
