Few argue with the premise that the public should be the primary beneficiaries of publicly funded research and technology development. But how they should benefit is the subject of hot debate. The U.S. government’s approach has been to facilitate the transfer of technology into the market by privatizing it. The idea is that the technology will be made available to the public only if a company can have exclusive access to it and effectively protect its investment. Since the 1980’s Congress has passed numerous pieces of legislation to streamline the transfer of drugs, agricultural materials and other technologies into private hands. The most important single law is the Bayh-Dole Technology Transfer Act. This approach has resulted in what some have called the tragedy of the anti-commons – excluding people from a non-depletable commons resulting in its under-use. For instance, NIEHS and other agencies spend millions of dollars on pharmaceuticals and then transfer them to private companies who profit from the publicly funded research. Patents and licenses prevent other companies from making cheaper, more accessible versions of the drugs. By making the public pay twice, the market is actually a method for excluding the public from the very things it paid to have created....
Technology transfer and the privatization of publicly funded research are terms of the old social contract. If we are going to establish a new social contract, the relationships between the public and scientists and corporations will need to change substantially. There are better ways to provide direct benefits to the public in exchange for their research dollars. We can imagine – and create -- a science commons where scientists are supported to investigate the most pressing questions and the public benefits from that research. If we do so, we are more likely to avoid both tragedies: the anti-commons tragedy of exclusion from the good things research creates or the commons tragedy of environmentally destructive technology. Maybe then science would be a true public good.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/19/2006 10:14:00 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.
