Open Access News

[I]t is widely recognized that the power of market stimulated and guided invention and innovation often is dependent on the strength of the science base from which they draw....This science base largely is the product of publicly funded research, and the knowledge produced by that research is largely open and available for potential innovators to use. That is, the market part of the Capitalist engine rests on a publicly supported scientific commons. The message of this essay is that the scientific commons is becoming privatized. While the privatization of the scientific commons up to now has been relatively limited, there are real dangers that unless halted soon important portions of future scientific knowledge will be private property and fall outside the public domain, and that could be bad news for both the future progress of science, and for technological progress. The erosion of the scientific commons will not be easy to stop. Here I want to call the alarm, and to suggest a strategy that has some promise....

An associated belief or ideal ["that until recently has served well to protect the scientific commons"] is that the results of scientific research are and should be published and otherwise laid open for all to use and evaluate. As Robert Merton (1973) argued, the spirit of science is ‘communitarian’ regarding access to the knowledge and technique it creates. All scientists are free to test the results of their fellows and to find them valid or not supported, and to build on these results in their own work. Because the results of scientific research are laid in the public domain for testing and further development, the bulk of scientific knowledge accepted by the community is reliable (as John Ziman (1978) has emphasized) and scientific knowledge is cumulative. These are basic reasons why the scientific enterprise has been so effective as an engine of discovery. And economists often have argued that keeping science open is the most effective policy for enabling the public to draw practical benefits from it. My argument in this essay is that the part of the theory about good science that stresses the value of open science is basically correct, but is in danger of being forgotten, or denied....The case for open scientific knowledge clearly needs to be reconstructed recognizing explicitly that much of scientific research in fact is oriented towards providing knowledge useful for the solution of practical problems, that the applications of new scientific findings often are broadly predictable, and that this is why control over scientific findings in some cases is financially valuable property. I think there is a case for keeping basic scientific knowledge open, even under these conditions. To privatize basic knowledge is a danger both for the advance of science, and for the advance of technology....In Section II, I discuss the rise and erosion of the idea that public support of open science is warranted because the expected returns are high but the areas of return are so uncertain that market mechanisms will not suffice....

I believe the key to assuring that a large portion of what comes out of future scientific research will be placed in the commons is staunch defense of the commons by universities. Universities almost certainly will continue to do the bulk of basic scientific research. If they have policies of laying their research results largely open, most of science will continue to be in the commons. However, universities are not in general supporting the idea of a scientific commons, except in terms of their own rights to do research. In the era since Bayh-Dole, universities have become a major part of the problem, avidly defending their rights to patent their research results, and license as they choose....The argument that if an exclusive license is not given, no one will try to advance, seems particularly dubious for research tools of wide application, or for findings that appear to open up possibilities for new research attacks on diseases where a successful remedy clearly would find a large market....Universities will not give up the right to earn as much as they can from the patents they hold unless public policy pushes them hard in that direction. I see the key as reforming Bayh-Dole. The objective here, it seems to me, is not to eliminate university patenting, but to establish a presumption that university research results, patented or not, should as a general rule be made available to all that want to use them at very low transaction costs, and reasonable financial costs. This would not be to foreclose exclusive or narrow licensing in those circumstances where this is necessary to gain effective technology transfer. Rather, it would be to establish the presumption that such cases are the exception rather than the rule.