IP in 3DP

Posted on June 9, 2010 by Gerald Barnett

Hit this article yesterday. Nice summary analysis of 3D printing under UK IP laws. Upshot is that many private uses won’t infringe. Nice discussion of the difference between using a control program to run a 3D printer to make an object and infringing that control program’s copyright by making copies of it (rather than from it). US analysis will have some differences. But it’s a start. More importantly, low cost 3D printing is coming, and it will change everything.

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Adding Some Short Stuff

Posted on June 9, 2010 by Gerald Barnett

I’ve been posting essay-length stuff here. That’s needed, since there’s little that is published in this area that has any heft to it and isn’t caught up in scholarly self-annotation. Turns out that blog discussions have way more to offer. Though they are not finely pointed with footnotes, they also show their politics clearly, are directly debatable, and help folks understand the way practitioners see their own practice.

I’m going to make an attempt to post some shorter stuff as well, to mark out areas for further development, keep folks updated on what we are doing on the grant, and to identify stuff happening in the Big Wide that I come across. Let me know if this change helps at all.

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University Brand "Commercialization"

Posted on May 24, 2010 by Gerald Barnett

Some university technology administrators are adopting the idea that the crowning outcome of public research is commercial money-making. This idea is wrapped around a shift in vocabulary from “technology transfer” to “technology licensing” to “commercialization.” These are very different concepts. But in the hands of the bozonet, they are all the same thing–meaning, I guess, the concepts mean next to nothing (see Frankfurt, again, for the details–here).

Technology transfer means the new development of the capabilities needed to practice a technology (a means of accomplishing some practical thing, a “useful art”). A technology is transferred when someone new is using a technology that someone else knows. This could be from an established use in one industry to a new use in another, or from a developed country to a developing country, or from a lab to practice. There is nothing in technology transfer that requires company formation, commercial products, or even licensing of rights. These things may come along for the ride, but they are not front and center and certainly are not essential. Technology transfer is challenging, worthy, and not an unqualified public good.

Technology licensing has to do with rights and permissions. The value of the transaction is in the license contract, not in the broader relationships and creativity by which something is taught, or demonstrated, or figured out (which we call “engagement”). Licensing shifts the emphasis from utility to arbitrage of rights. The issues become legal, as the value play (and risk play) revolve around the formation of a contract. There may be social value as well, but it is not formally tracked (AUTM, for instance, has no way to ascertain social implications of licensing, so creates fuzzy story reports instead, leaving the “hard” numbers for the “bottom liners”). Only so many folks have the capability of signing up for a royalty bearing license, which typically requires the creation of commercial product to be sold in a marketplace, the bigger such a market, the better. Much of university technology licensing is devoted by policy, and by practice, and by personal fixation, to chasing licensing money.

Commercialization, then, offers a strange twist on licensing and technology transfer. At its broadest, commercialization means turning something–anything–into a product to be sold in a market. Whatever is going on, “commercialization” formalizes it as a money-making venture. Why teach others when you could hold back the IP, get investors to make a product, and sell it to the hungry masses instead? The funding gap is often the distance between what one could and should be doing on the one hand and on the other trying to make a commercial product of it instead.

I’m all for money-making ventures. I just don’t see them as the default anchor point for university research. Why should each research outcome or finding be referenced first (or only) to the potential for it to make a lot of money for the university if turned into the form of a commercial product or service? When did commercialization step in the door as the most desired outcome?

At least licensing still tracks IP that one has obtained from research. That is, licensing follows research. Commercialization gives up on this as too confining. Commercialization is about creating money positions based on product creation any way one can. While research IP continues to be part of such a portfolio (bureauklepts being what they are), commercialization also includes starting companies based on business ideas that don’t have a basis in research IP. The idea is to get rich however one can, using economic development and entrepreneurship as the calling cards.

Economic development and entrepreneurship are worthy practices. The question is whether universities led by administrators with faculty in tow as compulsed inventors should be the ones doing these things. One might think universities’ role should be to support these efforts, not to co-opt them. Some day we should thrash this bit out. For now, note that commercialization in the hands of university administrators means “put your resources into making money any way you can using IP, licenses, or start ups.”

Technology transfer is a worthy goal for a research university–labs should be sufficiently available that others learn from them how they do their research, what they have discovered, and how one might use and develop both tools and discoveries. Technology transfer is instruction, engagement, empowerment, not just a bipolar choice between distraction and wealth. The fundamental claim of technology transfer is: remember that your research does not exist solely to advance your own career or the status of your lab, but rather exists so that others benefit.

Technology licensing is more difficult. Bayh-Dole says: use the patent system to promote the use of federally supported inventions. Bayh-Dole doesn’t say, try to make a shit-load of money by beating up industry with your patent rights. Bayh-Dole doesn’t even pitch royalty-bearing licenses as a primary activity, and barely mentions commercialization (there, meaning creation of products from research IP). One could license research IP using public licenses–non-exclusive, on reasonable terms, perhaps at no charge and accepting no risk. But we don’t see universities doing that. Even if one wanted to make money, there is a general, nearly ubiquitous, fixation on making money in the license, rather than from other things that arise for a technology and its IP being broadly and easily available, such as workshops, research grants, consulting, and support.

University brand “commercialization” is the rotter in the bunch. It’s not focused on research output. It plays across expertise, insight, and business opportunity. Research findings end up as too arcane. Research IP is too slow and difficult. The idea is, use the reputation of the university, and the relative availability of faculty and students, to push ideas for commercial products into venture capital markets.

University commercialization slips from research findings and IP to random opportunism–follow the venture money and shop ideas. It’s so easy any shill can do it. But what’s the point of the lead shills being university administrators? With all due respect, does that really have success written all over it? Even if one *does* get some deal flow this way, what happens to the research outputs that are sequestered but not part of the deal flow?

University brand commercialization misses the importance of research IP moving into platform environments, where it becomes the tools, the ad hoc standards, and the shared environment for future research and future innovation. Most research findings and tools are not going to be the foundation for a new business or a commercial product, especially not a big hit make a pile product. But access to these findings and tools is critical. When a “technology transfer” office–no, uh, a “technology licensing” office–oops, I mean a trendy, cutting-edge “commercialization” office–starts to stockpile all the research IP and fans out to look for those lucre-quenching ideas that must just be lolling around faculty and grad student skulls, then perhaps we are beyond service to the public.

It would be understandable if that part of the public that supported universities based on instruction, public science, and a degree of independence from corporate mores simply walked away when they saw senior administration turn to “commercialization” as the primary metric of public research. I suspect that most faculty don’t accept “commercialization” as the primary estimator of their research impact, aren’t lazy and ignorant as a result of this refusal, and do not feel the need to “change their culture” so that they become hucksters for product-forming commercial habits. It makes no sense to force everyone in a university to participate in “commercialization” efforts via IP policy or a single IP office. It’s the shallowest implementation of Bayh-Dole yet.

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Social Media in Tech Transfer

Posted on May 14, 2010 by Gerald Barnett

I don’t quite know how to write this. Piscopo version at the end.

The key thing about social media is that it is social. That’s more than advertising and self-promotion, though both are of course in their own way part of “social.” Just that they are bits of social and not the whole thing or the most important thing. Social means engaging people as people not objects or abstractions or pawns, though of course all of this comes into social, too. Social means reciprocity, not just hunting and dragging spoils back to the den already soiled by the pups, though again all this is also a bit of social. Social means being interested in others, and in themes developed by others, not just in trying to be interesting, a center of attention, the loudest singing voice in the congregation, though, yeah, that’s a part of being social, too.

Media is a way of trying to develop out these human activities within the context of technology, which we’ve been doing since fire, wheels, drums, and rock painting. It’s just that the impulse to formalize this activity as “marketing” and by that meaning “promotion” and within that meaning “how do I find people willing to pay me for my patents?” is only a tiny bit of what folks want in their view of being social (I know, you have to ask them about this, but I think you’ll find they prefer not to have each daily thought intruded upon by someone with their pants full of advertising, now using new media).

When I see some discussion of how one responds to that twitter feed, or comments placed on a web site, or when one places useful comments on other web sites, and isn’t just being the huckster, then I think, that’s cool, people are engaged. About the dullest, saddest thing is to see YouTube videos on technology that are the same smiley fluff one sees in annual reports. At least give us Downfall parodies.

***

Put it another way. Some folks are committed to the conventional model of university tech transfer. That’s okay. I’m fine with it. Live long and prosper. It’s a seductive model. Simple enough to be understood even by the most inveterate slumlording university administrator. Invention disclosed, office reviewed, ownership obtained, patents filed, marketing, licensing, royalties. Call it “commercialization.” If the discussion is how to improve the marketing part of this model, well, I think that’s okay. I won’t speak against it. Lotsa luck. Literally. The numbers aren’t with you after 30 years, and it’s not going to magically come unstuck. Commercialization as a primary approach to IP is, for universities, a political, social, and research dead end. It’s not the primary objective of Bayh-Dole. It’s not a meaningful mission within academic norms, and it is ill suited to university administration. That said, go ahead and try.

Let’s talk ROI. You have a 1% proposition for what you claim are the outcomes, and that’s best practice. Try all the social media you want. You really think it might double your productivity? So the 1% proposition is now 2%? Well, that might be great for the financial condition of the portfolio taken as a whole–that means, you make enough money to quench the lucre lust of administrators and keep your office funded.

But for the thousands of research teams working to build relationships and compete for leadership positions, for research inventors looking to work their own breakthrough networks, small companies looking to partner, large companies looking to manage science in the context of their own IP strategies (which often do not include trying to become the next monopolist with someone else’s bits of IP), and for communities looking to develop their economies and quality of life through technology decisions–for these, the simple, seductive model operating at 1% or 2% or even 5% is living hell. It is poisonous. It is a pretty poisonous frog, and marketing is that part of making the poison pretty.

Marketing also then becomes the defensive posture that seeks to explain why all criticisms of the model are bitter, isolated attacks and why better “training” and more “resources” and more money in “gap funds” and better behaviors by industry in the form of “innovative capacity” and “good faith negotiation” would make the model “work.” The model itself is not poisonous. The practice of extending the model from what it does well to everything is poisonous. The practice of making participation in the model compulsory is poisonous. The attempt to operate technology transfer offices as set processes made to appear orderly for the sake of appeasing university administrators is poisonous. This kind of stuff won’t be fixed by better “marketing.” Fix as in “cat” not “car.” Take as your IP policy: “don’t be poisonous.”

***

One more try, for those who have made it this far. The alarmist version.

The idea that an “office” is interposed between research teams and their communities, that patents become a dominant asset among all the others in conveying research results, and that this office in accumulating patents represents itself as an agent for each inventor across all areas of research, for all industries, for all investment environments, for all operating models just doesn’t hold up. It doesn’t scale. It can’t scale. One ends up with a front-end story about marketing each and every invention for its own special potential but in practice working a portfolio model for maybe 20 inventions a decade. The rest “lack commercial potential.” But more nearly, the rest “should have been handled in a different manner.” And more clearly: “the model only works when it is highly selective.” And yet again: “the model doesn’t work for the vast majority of research assets, including inventive assets, and it’s poisonous that technology transfer offices are pushing for more control over research assets rather than less–poisonous not only for the research community, but for the success of Bayh-Dole, and for the success of the conventional model itself.”

The conventional model has had nearly a hundred year run. It dates to Research Corporation. WARF made that model provincial, tied to a single campus, but still an independent operation. A number of university faculty followed that model and created research foundations. The internal offices and the capture of external foundations after Bayh-Dole by university administrations have introduced changes that in the name of efficiency and process and orderliness and convenience and simplicity have had a really bad effect on university-industry relationships, on access by small companies, on start up initiatives (even while promoting start ups!), and on the community uptake of scholarship having inventive components.

The comeback that I lack “data” for this claim is itself part of the poison. O Priests of Baal! (no offense to Baal–as used here it’s a literary allusion). Just look at the numbers in context, see the backstory structure of the portfolios these offices are reporting. It’s glaringly obvious. Even the research community in talking among themselves tend to “get it”. It’s not that they can do “better” with this same model–it’s just that they have a heck of a lot of other things to do with the same research asset base, and the “offices” are not in any sort of position to help them with those other things. The offices could be, if they restructured, converted, extended, apologized, advocated, and learned. But not the way they are presently set up via policy, via assumptions about innovation, via assumptions about patents, via assumptions about financials, via practices. It may be the train has already left the station. AUTM certainly behaves as if this is true (no offense to AUTM–it’s just someone has to play the role of loyal opposition).

So what I write about the model can be represented as unhelpful, obstructionist, foolish. Only smart MBA like folks with a “more like a business” attitude can drive that train, apparently. But I say it’s heading for a wreck, and it’s a wreck of the universities’ own making. I don’t have any delight in that wreck, but I’d say it’s less than five years out, and the folks trying to license research patents to the first available monopolist that shows up and who have not been clear, or honest, with their own research community or with senior administrators, will have run this train off the tracks. No amount of “spin” or “marketing” to get people on board the train, or support its effort to increase speed, or celebrate its apparent “successes” will save it. It is a patent aggregation model generally lacking the resources or position to attack industry and investors as it should to maximize its financial success, and lacking the resources or position to develop sufficiently valuable gifts for the status quo to be rewarded as it desires, with royalty bearing licenses. Social media won’t save this marketing effort. The model is flawed because it is over-extended, superficially generalized, and compared with being “corporate.” And that is what will kill off even the workable, decent parts of it.

***

Translated into piscopo.

Social media!
Very social!
Get a life!
Marketeers!
Simplistic model!
Poison frog!
Priests of Baal!
Selectivity!
Alternatives!
Danger train!
Epic fail!
Change or die!

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Bah! Dolts!

Posted on April 13, 2010 by Gerald Barnett

It appears that AUTM and others are gearing up for a big push to change Bayh-Dole. They hope to get the Supreme Court to take a look at Stanford v. Roche and are ginning up a new amicus brief to that effect. I haven’t see the draft, but I hear that 20+ universities are already signed on.

The change I expect they will argue for will be that Bayh-Dole imposes a federal “invent for hire” condition on all federally sponsored research at universities and other federal contractors, so that the contractor owns patent rights outright without the need for assignments; thus, Stanford v. Roche was wrongly decided, the present assignment is pre-empted under federal law, and Stanford gets its money. Elsewhere I’ve argued this is a heap of parrot droppings, which it is. Close reading of the law puts the AUTM position to shame. Longstanding practice in the PTO and TLOs shows no one has interpreted the law that way. And it’s counter to sound public policy and innovation practice.

The effect of such an argument is to hump up administrative power and treat faculty as mere labor. This, when faculty inventors created the approach the TLOs have inherited and now are running into the ground, making Bayh-Dole into Bah! Dolts!

Now of course, the amicus brief could go a different way than the last one AUTM signed on to. It could be that the argument is that Stanford v. Roche was wrongly decided because the *scope* of the present assignment could not extend to the federal grant work, and that the moment the investigator was working within the scope of the federal grant, the scope of the present assignment was pre-empted. This would be a useful argument to explore. It would have to do with how scope becomes contractual, a meeting of the minds, and the precedence of federal procurement over prior private agreements. Given that the scope language was dictated by the company claiming the benefit (or, the company that acquired the assets and therefore claiming the benefit), one might expect interpretations to go against the drafting party.

Rather than turn the whole invention ecosystem on its head to shake a few million out of corporate pockets, it might be worth slicing the case up a different way. Then one can ask whether it is sound public policy that present assignments are forever unless expressly limited in scope, and that the scope, if broadly applicable to almost anything should be interpreted that way, so that research personnel no longer have independent livelihoods, post-employment. Another way: should any present assignment absent a clear, express commitment by the future inventor to give over all ownership regardless of future circumstances be read that way?

What matters is whether this is how we want things to be, not so much how accidents of the existing law play out.

So we’ll see what AUTM comes up with this time, and whether it continues its attack on university faculty inventors, or whether it rediscovers its roots and changes direction.

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Bills of Rights and Geneva Conventions

Posted on April 13, 2010 by Gerald Barnett

Inventors are in the thick of creativity and discovery and bureaucrats are not.

Yet we find some AUTM folks these days arguing fervently for a stronger affinity with bureaucrats than with inventors. They do this even when successful inventors show up and tell them they could be doing things different, for much better outcomes. How absurd is that? It’s true that faculty inventors cannot be expected to know the full spectrum of procedures by which patents are obtained, but they don’t have to. They can work with intermediaries who do. For some reason, this idea is obvious to everyone but some of those who work in TLOs.

It is also true that university licensing officers cannot each be expected to know the full spectrum of actions by which breakthrough networks are created for innovation. It simply isn’t possible. It takes five skills at minimum, meaning very talented and committed people working for 5 or 10 years or more… and even then the experience will be necessarily limited to a few industry segments.

In the recent Bill of Rights debate, it appears that AUTM folks have got their historical documents wrong. We’re talking Bill of Rights–that is, rights for the enjoyment of life and liberty that are not ceded to central authority–not the Geneva Convention on how to treat prisoner faculty and their inventions nicely so they become docile and compliant. The debate is how better to let go, not how better to hold fast.

The moment a TLO drops compulsory assignment, admits it cannot deal in all areas, and admits that it has a lot to learn about innovation–along with the rest of us–then there’s a common ground with faculty investigators and inventors from which strategies can be developed and mutual decisions taken.

Until then, TLO policies that force actions on investigators and inventors represent a bureaucratic attack on innovation while using the language of innovation. Such a TLO is decidedly anti-faculty. Faculty are mere labor. This is wrong, and untrue, and damaging.

And so long as senior administrators permit senior administrators to do anything they wish as an exception to policy without those exceptions necessarily requiring the approval of the inventors, if not also principal investigators and sponsors, then the TLO will increasingly be seen as a place where new technology and inventor commitments to technology transfer go to die. (BTW, There are quite legal ways to avoid one’s own TLO. These are something every freedom-loving, impact-committed faculty investigator and inventor should know.)

If people want change, one place to start is a Bill of Rights that restores to faculty investigators and inventors their proper, leading place in the university research ecosystem. Even better, drop the pretense of corporate “efficiencies” in innovation and get rid of compulsory assignment, especially as a condition of employment.

Universities represent a distinctive contributor to national discovery and invention. They do this by employing faculty as free agents making commitments to the public. University administrators do not have to force such commitments. It is not university administrators that has established these commitments in the first place. Administrators are butlers, not bosses. Stewards, not kings. It’s a bitter pill, I know. This doesn’t mean that professionals working with faculty are scum. But it does mean that faculty define the function of the university. While process-loving administrators may think otherwise, doing so reduces the research distinction of university work to its non-distinctive corporate equivalent. It may be that corporate research is fine, but its approach to innovation and IP is not the university approach.

Why would universities hire licensing folks with a mandate to root out all those parts of university research that are distinctive, and impose corporate discipline, processes, and management? Why would AUTM turn into an advocate for that? Because they’ve got the Geneva Convention on the brain. It’s a crazy world, no?

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Lab Budgets

Posted on April 8, 2010 by Gerald Barnett

A post over on Techno-L caught my eye. It asked if anyone had dealt with cost recovery for business and lab costs in dealing with licensing income. A number of responses lay out the party line on what patent licensing income is supposed to be: a windfall, extra money, or something to be fought over without any compelling claim. And every bit booked as a cost is an administrative take-away from inventors and departments. More munchies for the licensing office. There’s another way to look at it.

The conventional approach to royalty sharing practices derive from assumptions about patent licensing. So long as folks are fixated on a technology commercialization model in which patents are licensed for the creation of products that pay a royalty, a royalty sharing schedule will look like a division of windfall, and it will appear at best to be the place where inventor interests and administrative claims finally stalemate out. Under Bayh-Dole, a university could allocate all income to costs incidental to the management of federally supported inventions and have nothing left for administrators to spend. (Note: payments to inventors are expressly part of the “costs incidental” in Bayh-Dole).

The treatment of a “share to the lab” in this formulation is as a *share of the windfall*. In most royalty sharing schedules I’ve seen (and I’ve read a lot of these over the years), the lab share is the smallest portion. The idea is, patent income is a dividend, and the lab should be recovering its costs through grant funding, not royalties. There are assumptions here that ought to be looked at more closely, but it’s nigh unto religion, so we’ll just note it. The problem for administrators is, oddly, that they *don’t like to see a lab so well off that it has a lot of money*. Why is that? It’s a religious thing. Continue reading →

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The Value of TLOs

Posted on March 26, 2010 by Gerald Barnett

The TLO (technology licensing office) is a bug in the grass of innovation. There’s so much more involved than holding patents on research inventions for money. However, bugs have their place in innovation, provided they are the right kind of bug. After all the “no-ing” of my last post, here’s a broader discussion of why getting to “no” is so important for the future vitality of TLO practice.

The TLO as a patent broker descends from faculty innovation. The idea of the university TLO starts with Research Corporation and an inspired idea by Frederick Cottrell to use patents as a means of promoting the connection of academic research and industrial investment for the public good. In the 1920s and 30s and 40s, the TLO moved through the variations of WARF and other location-specific foundations serving specific campuses rather than national research organizations such as the Smithsonian Institute. By the 1940s and 50s, Vannevar Bush drew on the model to propose a national research foundation, which took the form of the NSF, with other federal agencies following with their own mission-directed variations. That same model produced some of the great federal research universities–Stanford, MIT, Wisconsin, and Washington among them. In many ways, the fabric of federal research, and the various intermediaries by which it operates, are derived from faculty-led innovation in research and innovation management. At each point, those innovations have had to use administration, and defend themselves from too much of it. Continue reading →

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Feeling in the "No" Mood

Posted on March 22, 2010 by Gerald Barnett

I’m feeling in the “no” today. Here are some questions and various reasons why not.

Should TLOs have first right to “commercialize”?

No. Commercialization should not be the first activity for research outcomes.
No. The first right should be offered, not grabbed.
No. TLOs generally lack the resources or expertise to commercialize.
No. Universities should not be directly involved in commercialization.
No. TLOs have limited idea of what it means to commercialize.
No. TLOs are where research ideas go to die.

Should universities own research inventions outright?

No. Universities should have only limited ownership interest in inventions.
No. University ownership complicates most transactions.
No. Universities should review before making ownership claims.
No. Doing so fragments ownership in collaborative research.
No. Claiming ownership reduces inventor motivation.
No. Claiming ownership of inventions fragments other intangible assets.
No. Owning inventions creates institutional conflicts of interest.

Should assignment of inventions be compulsory for faculty?

No. Faculty are not hired to invent.
No. Research conditions, not employment, should determine assignment.
No. Faculty are not employees for purposes of scholarship and research.
No. Faculty owe their service to the public, not to the administration.
No. Universities have poor track records with compulsory assignments.
No. Universities obtain low quality inventions.
No. Compulsory methods void critical elements of inventive relationships.
No. Universities are rarely important agents in breakthrough networks.

Do TLOs provide the optimal path for university research inventions?

No. TLOs run portfolio services, and succeed on maybe ten inventions in 1,000.
No. A single TLO cannot possibly handle the range of research at most universities.
No. Sincerity is not substitute for expertise. TLOs need to partner to succeed.
No. A TLO assumes it has to market, but another agent may already have a deal.
No. A TLO forces an invention to be a university asset, adding complexity.
No. TLO operating assumptions prevent them from serving open innovation.
No. TLOs assume the path is always from research to industry.
No. TLOs cannot partner readily with other TLOs, so cannot work at scale.

All this negativity can be positively liberating!

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Software and Data in Policy-Making Research

Posted on March 8, 2010 by Gerald Barnett

I have been following the “Climategate” situation involving the release of email and software from the University of East Anglia. Apart from what appears to be scientific fraud on the part of a number of scientists, I’m considering what this kind of thing means for technology transfer IP management, especially where software and data are concerned. In the US, under Circular A-110, __.36 (now 2 CFR 200.315), researchers receiving federal funds who publish papers that are used in agency policy-making are required to make their data available upon request. One might go further and argue that doing so also may require access to software and metadata. The point is: the data should stand up to scrutiny if it is going to be the subject of policy-making. And it’s clear that with the climate data, there was a heck of a lot of policy making going on, and the scientists knew it.

It appears that over in the UK, the UEA scientists worked hard to prevent the release of both data and software. Furthermore, they appear to have been helped in this by UEA administrators, who assisted in blocking freedom of information requests. It appears similar things have been happening in the US. If that’s the case, then it’s a tremendous blow to university science. One might come to believe now that universities are not in a particularly good position to investigate their own behaviors with regard to IP.

People are starting to speak out. A recent article in the Telegraph ends with:

“[Dr. Don Keiller, deputy head of life sciences at Anglia Ruskin University] said: “What these emails reveal is a detailed and systematic conspiracy to prevent other scientists gaining access to CRU data sets. Such obstruction strikes at the very heart of the scientific method, that is the scrutiny and verification of data and results by one’s peers.”

Professor Darrel Ince, from the department of computer science at the Open University, added: “A number of climate scientists have refused to publish their computer programs; what I want to suggest is that this is both unscientific behaviour and, equally importantly ignores a major problem: that scientific software has got a poor reputation for error.”

From the perspective of technology transfer, whatever the interest in “commercialization” may be, a university must be in a position to encourage–if not insist–that data, metadata, and software used to support claims made in the scholarly literature also be made readily available. This is the basis of independently validated science.

If one goes back to the five areas of IP practice–CANVIS–then it’s clear that scholarship IP practices must take precedence. Otherwise, it’s not university research, really. What technology transfer offices haven’t worked out, in general, however, is how to make IP available for research purposes (including research at for-profit organizations). University TLOs still do not routinely reserve rights for all research purposes (usually only for use at their own institution), and do not establish in exclusive license agreements that the licensee has no right to sue to prevent research uses.

We can get into the differences between evaluation of claimed data, studies on that data, and research that makes use of the data (such as, as an operational tool). But the starting point is the necessity for universities to make available data, metadata, and source codes for inspection.

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