Managing University Intellectual Property in the Public Interest (2011) / Chapter Skim
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2 Influence of Technology Transfer on University Research Norms and Practices
2 Influence of Technology Transfer on University Research Norms and Practices
Pages 29-42
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From page 29... ...
The first centers on whether efforts to commercialize technology have undermined traditional academic norms, and the second focuses on the effectiveness of universities in achieving the goals of the Bayh-Dole Act. This chapter addresses the first set of concerns, that is, whether the technology transfer system is having adverse effects on publicly funded science by inhibiting open communication of research results and sharing of research inputs and data, distorting research priorities, and detracting from faculty hiring and promotion based on scholarly excellence.
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From page 30... ...
As of January 2010, only 74 of AUTM's member institutions have signed on. CONCERNS ABOUT UNINTENDED EFFECTS ON ACADEMIC NORMS Regardless of whether the real contributions of patenting and licensing activity to commercialization of federally funded inventions can actually be isolated and measured, some observers have expressed concern about whether the drive to patent, license, and commercialize research discoveries is antithetical to the traditional norms and functions of the university, namely, to expose students to the latest advances in knowledge, to conduct systematic inquiries, and to widely communicate research findings.51 Is it possible that the 51 P
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These concerns center on whether the norm of open science that has traditionally dominated academic research would be threatened by restrictions on or delays of publication and limits on access to discoveries, data, instruments, tools, and other research inputs. Some assert "Bayh-Dole contributed to the creation of an ‘anti-commons' by establishing incentives for universities to develop independent technology transfer programs and to manage IP in a highly individualized and even competitive framework."52 Researchers have tended to examine each of these propositions independently.
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2001. Protecting Subjects, Preserving Trust, Promoting Progress: Policy and Guidelines for the Oversight of Individual Financial Interests in Human Subjects Research.
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Likewise, an industry survey published in 2007 by Thursby and Thursby found that half of the firms sponsoring research at universities sought to include publication delay clauses in 90 percent of their contracts.59 The average delay was four months, but some firms required as much as a year's delay. In 2008, Huang and Murray examined 4,270 human gene patents and found that patent strategies in the area of human genetics resulted in modest but measurable decreases in the amount of public (published)
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From page 34... ...
that year.63 However, the protection provided by provisional applications can be illusory. Claims filed in regular non-provisional applications that rely on priority from provisional applications to overcome prior art can be rejected during prosecution or invalidated in later patent litigation if the provisional application is not drafted with sufficiently specific information to support those later claims.64 Drafting a more detailed disclosure in a provisional application increases time and expense and may not be the norm for technology transfer offices with numerous early-stage invention disclosures and a limited prosecution budget.
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From page 35... ...
Some critics have charged that patenting and licensing activity has put "the profit motive directly into the heart of academic life," driving faculty away from traditional, socially more beneficial pursuits.66 Empirical research on this issue has measured the relationship of commercial activity to publication counts, citation counts as well as citation patterns, industry- and federally-sponsored research, and citation-based measures of the fraction of faculty research effort that can be classified as basic research. The majority of the studies have not found evidence of negative effects of commercially related faculty activity.
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From page 36... ...
The empirical evidence cited earlier of a close association between research output and commercial involvement suggests that this would be an appropriate concern only if the traditional criteria for academic career advancement were being displaced. CONCERNS ABOUT INTERFERENCE WITH FOLLOW-ON RESEARCH AND APPLICATIONS The "anti-commons" hypothesis first articulated by Heller and Eisenberg73 suggests that the proliferation of patents held by diverse stakeholders on upstream elements of biomedical research in particular could handicap or prevent follow-on research and applications because of the difficulty or cost of obtaining rights to use those patented inputs.
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From page 37... ...
Walsh and colleagues found a high level of commercial involvement on the part of biomedical researchers in their sample, a low level of awareness whether any of their research inputs were patented by others (and even less inclination to inquire) , and thus an extremely low incidence of cases in which a lack of access to relevant technology protected by IP caused a line of research to be delayed significantly or redirected.
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From page 38... ...
Not only is the patent landscape becoming more complex in many domains of research, but also the absence of evidence for a substantial patent thicket or a patent blocking problem is clearly linked to the general lack of awareness and concern among investigators about existing IP. That could change if patent holders, aware that universities are not shielded from liability by a research exception, take more active steps to assert their patents against them.
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According to Lei, Juneja, and Wright, their sample of agricultural scientists at four land-grant institutions "believe that institutionally mandated MTAs put sand in the wheels of a lively system of intra-disciplinary exchanges of research tools."85 According to Feldman and Bercovitz, MTAs are no more popular with technology transfer personnel, who reported spending about 10 percent of their time negotiating them. "They are considered time consuming while offering little upside revenue potential."86 Several leading research universities have recently made an effort to minimize the use of MTAs and, where deemed necessary, use only Simple Letter Agreements (SLAs)
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In the meantime, the concerns described remain. CONCLUSIONS This chapter summarized a substantial body of research suggesting that the expansion of faculty entrepreneurial activity and institutional technology transfer activity at U.S.
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From page 41... ...
Moreover, because there are charges for diagnostic tests in most cases as well as research uses of such tests, this activity often lies on the border between research and commercial activity. Other, subtler negative effects of faculty entrepreneurial activity and university patenting and licensing are difficult to investigate and quantify but may be occurring.
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