The long awaited and very much debated act, titled the Intellectual Property Rights from Publicly Financed Research and Development Act 51 of 2008, was passed on 22 December 2008. The Act itself represents a step forward in terms of stimulating innovation and economic growth by the identification of commercialisation opportunities arising from publicly funded research and development, as well as the preferential access to the commercialisation opportunities for small enterprises and BBBEE entities. For more information on the Act please visit SabinetLaw.

The Act allows for structures involved in managing the processes on both a national and institutional level to be established. Section 8 of the Act makes provision for the establishment of an office within the Department of Science and Technology called the National Intellectual Property Management Office (NIPMO) who must promote the objectives of the Act. Section 6 focuses on the creation of offices of technology transfer at higher education institutions (as defined in section 1 of the Higher Education Act, 1997) as well as stipulating the various tasks within these offices. One of the tasks of an office of technology transfer would be to manage all aspects related to intellectual property within the organisation/institution as the recipient of public funds for research and development purposes (i.e. identification, protection, IP transactions, commercialisation etc.).

The commencement date of the Act has not yet been proclaimed, yet it would be of great interest to see the impact the Act may have on libraries and library services, especially at tertiary institutions considering the streamlining of campus-wide information management processes and the dissemination of and access to information. Some libraries may make use of the opportunity to realign services to support the offices of technology transfer at their respective institutions, since collection development policies as well as access to information policies might need to change to better support the flow of information internally as well as externally. Future studies on research output may prove or disprove the anticipated effect this Act may also have on the quantity of research completed in certain disciplines, including the possible positive change in South Africa’s position on the world ranking in terms of research output and patent registrations.