stream to the collections, which would otherwise be entirely dependent on public funding. Moreover, the selling of strains is often complemented by other services such as identification services for industry and research contracts. The results of the survey show that of all the funding streams other than core funding, the selling of strains (both to public and private institutions) topped the supplementary income streams, followed by contract research, other services and lastly income from patent and safety deposits.
The industry clients exercise their influence not only through bringing an income stream to the collections, but also through the indirect mechanisms which are the standard procedures, technical tools and cognitive approaches imposed in the actors’ networks. The original quantitative survey that was conducted for this study showed the importance of the procedures that are imported from commercial practices and adopted by the research sector. 40% of the interviewed collections received some or all of their strains through some formal agreement, either through material transfer agreements, accession forms or other contracts. Therefore, formalization is still not the major practice in the PSMCs but the major international collections obtain the vast majority of their materials through contracts and the trend is clearly in the direction of more formal contracting. A 2009 semi-structured questionnaire on exchange and distribution
patterns in PSMCs shows similar results and confirms the increase in formal transactions. Amongst a group of 43 culture collections from Europe (20), America (11), Asia (5), Australia (5) and Africa (1) more than 50% used formal means of transaction in most of the cases (that is, written agreements in their accession and distribution forms); 25% never used formal means and the remaining group used them only occasionally.[1] These results were equally distributed over OECD and non-OECD collections that participated in the survey. Another indicator of the adoption of commercial standards for exchange is the use of ISO certification of management procedures. 13% out of 113 collections that answered this question of the survey had adopted the ISO certificate. The survey shows that the proportion of collections adopting certification is still substantially less than their involvement in
- ↑ Tom Dedeurwaerdere, Maria Iglesias, Sabine Weiland and Michael Halewood, “The Use and Exchange of Microbial Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture”, Background Study Paper of the Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, 46 (2009); and Tom Dedeurwaerdere, “Global Microbial Commons: Institutional Challenges for the Global Exchange and Distribution of Microorganisms in the Life Sciences”, Research in Microbiology, 161 (2010), 414–21.
