David Epstein, Good Business, Inside Higher Ed, January 12, 2006. Excerpt:
Tales about business interests in technology impeding the flow of academic information linger in the minds of many researchers like horror stories. But in most cases involving DNA patents, licensing concerns have not restricted sharing among colleagues in academe. A study conducted by LeRoy Walters, professor of bioethics at Georgetown University, and six colleagues — from academe and from private industry — found that, even when universities grant exclusive licensing rights to companies, they insist on the right to share technology for academic research. “The licensing of DNA patents by U.S. academic institutions: an empirical survey,” published this month in Nature Biotechnology, gathered data from 19 technology transfer offices at leading research institutions, some of which are among the most prolific DNA patent holders in the country. All of those respondents, according to the paper, generally retain the freedom to share technology for research purposes. The paper suggests that 1999 guidelines by the National Institutes of Health, which urge grant and contract recipients to share “research tools with all biomedical researchers who request them,” set the tone for academic cooperation, and are widely considered by academic researchers to be stipulations of receiving grants. “It was almost like a gentleman’s agreement when it became clear NIH wanted people to share,” Walters said....Rebecca Eisenberg, a patent law professor at the University of Michigan who specializes in biomedical research, said that...while some things are getting better, data hoarding between colleges and companies is still prevalent since the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, which allowed colleges and companies to gain exclusive rights to government funded research. “It made companies more reluctant to allow universities to use information freely, because they view them as competitors,” Eisenberg said. “If you’re going to have a mixed system of public and private science, this is going to happen.”
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/12/2006 10:32:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
