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WIPO EOI RPF WIPR .... RIP?

By Johanna Gibson, David Pearce, Jeremy Phillips and Ilanah Simon.

Back in 2007 the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) issued a Call for Expression of Interest (EOI) for Request for Proposals No. PCD/07/038. This Call, which was to be answered by 31 July of that year, related to the proposed launch of a new journal, named in the EOI as the World Intellectual Property Review. It states, in relevant part:

"WIPO is about to issue a Request for Proposals (RFP) in order to select a partner publisher for its new journal, World Intellectual Property Review (WIPR), to be launched in 2008. The WIPR is to be an academic journal dealing with intellectual property (IP) issues at the international level. Its focus will be on interdisciplinary research and analysis of policy, economic, legal and technical areas, including the topics discussed in international fora, as well as national developments on IP that have global effect. Therefore, the WIPR should be distinguished from other IP journals that deal mainly with national topics or solely with legal or trade and investment issues. As such, its readers as well as contributors are expected to be from different parts of the world, including both developed and developing regions. The language used, however, for the publication of the WIPR will be in English.

This journal is mainly in response to numerous demands received by WIPO for IP education and training, as well as sharing and disseminating more evidence and fact-based arguments to promote international debates on IP issues. It is also because there is a great need for high-quality research and analysis of IP issues, particularly on policy, at the international level.

Any interested publisher wishing to participate in the prequalification procedure is invited to download the electronic version of the questionnaire [ DOC] [ PDF] and to return it ...

The purpose of this call for EOI is to identify appropriate publishers who could be selected to make proposals to WIPO; it does not constitute an invitation to tender. Only publishers deemed qualified by WIPO will receive the invitation to tender.

WIPO is the sole judge as to the preselection of the publishers. The selection will take into account the answers to the questionnaire according to the following criteria:

* Reputation and experience of the publisher; and
* Experience in publishing IP journals or other relevant journals".

The IPKat asks, does anyone know what, if anything, has happened to this project? It sounds like fun if it's going to focus on "interdisciplinary research and analysis of policy, economic, legal and technical areas", especially if the results of interdisciplinary research can be made sufficiently jargon-free for ordinary intelligent people to be able to read them and understand their content.

Merpel says, there is already a publication that goes under the name of World Intellectual Property Review, published by Newton Media since 2006 (see illustration of the prior art, right). Surely the WIPO would not dream of appropriating a title that is already in use. But did they do a name search first ...?

How to choose a good title here
How to buy a good title here

Full post as published by IPKat on December 13, 2008 (boomark / email).