Dear colleagues worldwide,
Welcome to the workshop PANELFIT-LAWSci-02, H2020 Challenges in Law, Technology, Life, and Social Sciences; which was held from 2018-Nov-01 to 2019-Jan-25, MDPI AG, SciForum Platform, Basel, Switzerland. This workshop is associated to the European Commission Project PANELFIT H2020. In this sense, the workshop series will help to attract the attention of the pubic worldwide over the topics of the project. The project is concerned about changes in the regulation of ICT research and innovation are opening up a new scenario. It is expected that stakeholders, policy makers, and end users adapt to them as soon as possible. This, however, might be hard, especially for SMEs. PANELFIT is firmly committed to facilitating this adaptation process by producing a set of editable, open access Guidelines, validated by two data protection agencies. Once produced, they will serve as operational standards able to reduce the ethical and legal issues posed by ICT technologies while promoting innovation and market growth, enabling high-quality job creation and ensuring an adequate level of privacy and security/cybersecurity.
Furthermore, we will produce a complementary set of six outcomes to 1) suggest possible concrete improvements to the current regulatory and governance framework, both at the EU and the national level, 2) create mutual learning and support tools and to promote networking among stakeholders and policy makers and 3) increase the quantity and quality of the information available to policy makers, professionals, researchers, journalists and the public.
All these outcomes will be produced by a co-creation process involving policy makers, stakeholders, and end-users. They will all participate in the creation of the main outcomes of the project through a range of engagement activities that includes workshops, public consultations, encounters, surveys, etc. This will be combined with a strong communication and dissemination strategy that includes numerous activities, such as webinars, MOOC courses, public debates, a constant use of a web site and social networks and the creation of a Platform for Mutual Learning, which is meant to become the reference forum for the discussion of the issues at stake even after the end of the project. The participation in PANELFIT of the European Data Journalism Network, with an aggregated web audience of almost 70 million monthly visits will help us reach this aim.
In this sense, LAWSci workshop series associated this year to PANELFIT Project in order to promote multidisciplinary collaborations and debate in the frontiers of Law, Technology, Life, and Social Sciences. The interaction between bio-science and ICTs has forged great developments in many fields. However, the appreciation of these discoveries is sadly, all too often, accompanied by a lack of understanding of the legal implications. This conference series aims to provide a reference to the various legal avenues that are available for the protection of scientific advances, but also the legal instruments to protect society from unwanted effects. It constitutes a study of some of the legal implications of bioscience and ICT advances, weighing their impact on society and the law's role in shaping that effect.
The presentations will be focused on legal trends in different fields covering, but not limited to: patentability in plants and human genomics, clinical procedures’ standards, patients’ personal data protection, informed consent, regulatory issues in drug discovery, biomedical research legislation, toxicology, medico-legal problems such as healthcare malpractice, medical insurance or ethics in medical practice, software protection in chemo-informatics, bioinformatics, medical informatics, and social sciences, taxes in the biotechnology industry and causality/liability in environmental pollution, criminology, etc. The conference will run on-line and free, saving traveling and participation costs (subscriptions, open publication, participation in forum, certificates, etc., are free of cost).
