Publication and reuse of machine-readable data on the Web is one of the current trends in data management that is mainly manifested by the Open Data movement. This movement is especially strong in the government and public sector domain where many Open Government Data initiatives have been launched in a large number of countries across the globe. In the European Union the recent update of the P...

Advances in sarcoma treatment are largely based on investigator-initiated, multicentric and interdisciplinary clinical trials. The EU’s Good Clinical Practice Directive 2001/20/EC, effective since 2004, was meant to harmonize the conditions for clinical trials across Europe, but, instead, the challenge of initiating and running multinational, noncommercial clinical trials has become greater tha...

Article 4 of Council Directive 81/851/EEC requires that a Member State shall not authorise the placing on the market of a veterinary medicinal product intended for administration to food producing animals [...] unless the active substance [...] contained in the product: a) were authorised for use in other veterinary medicinal products in the Member State concerned on the day of entry into force...

Subsidies have become increasingly important tools of industrial policy due to the gradual liberalization of trade and finance since the 1960s. Still, there is considerable variation in subsidy levels in industrialized countries. In this paper, I seek to explain the variation in the levels of industrial subsidies among OECD countries in the period 1989-1995. I test the impact of both domestic p...

In 2014, at latest in 2015, extensive changes in the legal environment for patents in Europe are to be expected, having considerable impact on monopolizing inventions e.g. from the nanotechnology environment: With establishing the "European patent with unitary effect”, for the very first time the grant of single patents with uniform coverage of (almost) the entire territory of the European Unio...

European Institutions, especially the European Parliament, are venues of access for digital activist networks wishing to influence policymaking on issues of intellectual property rights, internet regulation and the respect of civil rights in digital environments. We refer to these networks as “digital activism”. They are more or less loosely rooted in hacker culture and are intensively making u...