Category Archives: intellectual property

Patents are destroying the soul of academic science

The soul of academic science is being destroyed, one patent at a time. Nowhere is this more evident than in the acrimonious battle between the University of California and The Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT over who owns the rights to commercialize gene and genome editing systems based on the CRISPR  immune system of bacteria. There […]

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For patents, against open access: The sad state of university leadership

Quick. Name a leader of a major research university who has taken a courageous stand on any important issue in the last decade. I know they’re out there. They must be. But I can’t think of one. Instead, I’m left dumfounded reading this amicus brief filed in a case – Bowman v. Monsanto – about […]

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Nature’s shiny sounding copout on open access

Nature has an editorial in this week’s issue on broader issues surround access to the scientific literature. Several people have sent it to me with some variation on “Wow, Nature is saying good things about open access”. I was skeptical, given that Nature has a long history of occasionally saying the right things about open access one […]

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Plagiarist or Puppet? US Rep. Carolyn Maloney’s reprehensible defense of Elsevier’s Research Works Act

There has been lots of activity this week surrounding the “Research Works Act“, a bill introduced in the US House of Representatives that seeks to end the NIH’s Public Access Policy. Despite the flurry of attention to the bill, its authors – Reps Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and Darrell Issa (R-CA) have remained silent (save a […]

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Our scientific societies need to quit the Association of American Publishers

By coming out in favor of the odious Research Works Act, which would end the NIH’s Public Access Policy, the American Association of Publishers has proven, once again, that it is eager to place its narrow interests ahead of those of the scientific community and public. It should come as now surprise that publishing behemoths […]

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Elsevier-funded NY Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney Wants to Deny Americans Access to Taxpayer Funded Research

In 2008, under bipartisan pressure from Congress to ensure that all Americans would be able to access the results of taxpayer-funded biomedical research, the US National Institutes of Health instituted a Public Access Policy: The NIH Public Access Policy ensures that the public has access to the published results of NIH funded research. It requires scientists to […]

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Does the UC patent amendment provide an opportunity for mischief?

About a month ago, I received an email with the subject “PLEASE SIGN NOW: UC Patent Amendment”. Being quite interested in issues of intellectual property in academia (as I will explain below, I think all IP arising from publicly funded work should be in the public domain) the combination of such insistent language along with […]

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