“Highlights
We examine the impact of the U.S. Department of Energy’s open-access mandate
Scientific articles subject to the mandate were utilized on average 42% more in patents
Articles subject to the mandate were not cited more frequently by other academic papers
Small firms were the primary beneficiaries of the increased knowledge diffusion…”
“The U.S. Patent Office has proposed new rules about who can challenge wrongly granted patents. If the rules become official, they will offer new protections to patent trolls. Challenging patents will become far more onerous, and impossible for some. The new rules could stop organizations like EFF, which used this process to fight the Personal Audio “podcasting patent,” from filing patent challenges altogether.
We need EFF supporters to speak out against this proposal, which is a gift for patent trolls….”
“I help Canadian neuroscience research institutes create and adopt an institute-level approach to open science. Inevitably, I end up talking to researchers, administrators, academic commercialization offices, and businesses about open science, intellectual property (IP), and technology transfer. I’ve written this blog post to highlight some examples of what is possible outside of the standard approach in the hope that it gets some people thinking about the much broader horizon of technology transfer that could exist.
These conversations can become a little… tense. The fact of the matter is that the value of freedom that is central to open science (i.e. freedom to access, freedom to use, freedom to adapt and remix) is in direct tension with IP. The basic purpose of IP is to take the most important right from standard property law–the right to exclude others from accessing or using something you own–and import it into the world of information….
When you are making physical tools this approach is known as “open hardware”. There are numerous examples, including the Miniscope,[4] OpenBCI,[5] OpenTrons,[6] the Glia Project,[7] OpenFlexure,[8] and FarmBot.[9]…
One thing that gives me hope is that if you look at the website of most TTOs and navigate to their mission statement you likely won’t find anything about patents or other forms of IP. What you will find is that they exist to help make sure that inventions are transferred out into the world in a way that produces economic and social good. I think that is what we all want. So, when I meet with technology transfer officers, entrepreneurial researchers, or institutional leadership that is where I start. My job then is simply to convince them that establishing open paths should be added to their toolkit. Doing so can often be quite fun! Hopefully this post helps at least some of you do the same.”
“But 30 years ago this week, that all changed. On April 30, 1993, something called the World Wide Web launched into the public domain….
CERN owned Berners-Lee’s invention…, and the lab had the option to license out the World Wide Web for profit. But Berners-Lee believed that keeping the web as open as possible would help it grow….
Berners-Lee eventually convinced CERN to release the World Wide Web into the public domain without any patents or fees. He has since attributed the runaway success of the web to that single decision….”
Performing Patents Otherwise is one of several experimental book pilot projects conducted by the experimental publishing group at the Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs project. In the spirit of open infrastructures, we documented the publication process for each pilot book. Towards this end, the experimental publishing group curated the Experimental Publishing Compendium, which collates experimental book publishing tools and practices and examples of experimental scholarly publications. While we share some insights on the making of experimental scholarly books in the compendium, we will zoom in here on what it takes to make database books and Performing Patents Otherwise in particular.
In the Compendium, we categorised Performing Patents Otherwise as a database book. We define database books as books containing a dynamically searchable database within their pages; or books generated from a database. In ‘making of,’ we reflect on the making Performing Patents Otherwise in the hope that it will be helpful to other authors and publishers who are experimenting with database books.
[…]
© 2023 Julien McHardy & Kat Jungnickel, chapters by respective authors. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license. Data from the Politics of Patents research project hosted at Goldsmiths, University of London, and funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (#819458).
“Etica finances Open Source science
Get new revenue streams for your Open Science organisation or your DAO.
A decentralised and permissionless crypto currency that allows to finance your open source research without the need to monetize Intellectual Property….
New revenue streams for Open Science organisations
Whether you are an Open Science organisation, a Dao or an independent researcher, you can benefit from Etica
You get financially rewarded within weeks, as opposed to years for the traditional system
All proposals shared within Etica are immediately available for anyone to use without patent restrictions…”
“Just like software development has been co-opted by a few global companies like Microsoft and Apple, the international seed development and trade, too, is controlled by a few big giants like Bayer (Monsanto), Corteva (DuPont) and ChemChina (Syngenta). A 2012 Oxfam study found that four companies dominate more than 60 percent of the global trade with grains….
In 2012, Kloppenburg and half a dozen like-minded agriculture experts founded OSSI [Open Source Seed Initiative] as an alternative to the monopolies. OSSI’s aim is the “free flow and exchange of genetic resources, of plant breeding and variety development,” Kloppenburg says. With global warming, disease and changing climatic patterns, “we need novel plant varieties that are capable of responding to the changes. Farm to table is popular, but we really need to talk about seed to table.”…”
“Patent holders must disclose how their invention works. That’s a basic principle of patents. So that is pretty much in line with Open Science, right?
Well…
To me the values of Open Science include sharing your knowledge with others in the pursuit of scientific progress and improvement of the world. Stopping others from working with and building upon your invention is not in the spirit of Open Science, but is – as far as I understand – THE central idea of patents….”
“Open-source development can solve these problems. Everyone has an interest in ensuring that only valid patents get issued. Patent owners cannot continue to spend millions of dollars defending their patents. And accused infringers cannot continue to face the decision to modify their products, spend millions in litigation or risk billions in patent damages.
Solving this problem in a fair, fast, and thorough way will require a cooperative effort. This immediately brings to mind an open-source approach. Open-source software (OSS) is a significant driver of freedom, trust and innovation in the digital age….”
“Open-source development can solve these problems. Everyone has an interest in ensuring that only valid patents get issued. Patent owners cannot continue to spend millions of dollars defending their patents. And accused infringers cannot continue to face the decision to modify their products, spend millions in litigation or risk billions in patent damages.
Solving this problem in a fair, fast, and thorough way will require a cooperative effort. This immediately brings to mind an open-source approach. Open-source software (OSS) is a significant driver of freedom, trust and innovation in the digital age….”
“Patent documents typically use legal and highly technical language, with context-dependent terms that may have meanings quite different from colloquial usage and even between different documents. The process of using traditional patent search methods (e.g., keyword searching) to search through the corpus of over one hundred million patent documents can be tedious and result in many missed results due to the broad and non-standard language used. For example, a “soccer ball” may be described as a “spherical recreation device”, “inflatable sportsball” or “ball for ball game”. Additionally, the language used in some patent documents may obfuscate terms to their advantage, so more powerful natural language processing (NLP) and semantic similarity understanding can give everyone access to do a thorough search.
The patent domain (and more general technical literature like scientific publications) poses unique challenges for NLP modeling due to its use of legal and technical terms. While there are multiple commonly used general-purpose semantic textual similarity (STS) benchmark datasets (e.g., STS-B, SICK, MRPC, PIT), to the best of our knowledge, there are currently no datasets focused on technical concepts found in patents and scientific publications (the somewhat related BioASQ challenge contains a biomedical question answering task). Moreover, with the continuing growth in size of the patent corpus (millions of new patents are issued worldwide every year), there is a need to develop more useful NLP models for this domain.
Today, we announce the release of the Patent Phrase Similarity dataset, a new human-rated contextual phrase-to-phrase semantic matching dataset, and the accompanying paper, presented at the SIGIR PatentSemTech Workshop, which focuses on technical terms from patents. The Patent Phrase Similarity dataset contains ~50,000 rated phrase pairs, each with a Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC) class as context. In addition to similarity scores that are typically included in other benchmark datasets, we include granular rating classes similar to WordNet, such as synonym, antonym, hypernym, hyponym, holonym, meronym, and domain related. This dataset (distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license) was used by Kaggle and USPTO as the benchmark dataset in the U.S. Patent Phrase to Phrase Matching competition to draw more attention to the performance of machine learning models on technical text. Initial results show that models fine-tuned on this new dataset perform substantially better than general pre-trained models without fine-tuning….”
“Various factors contribute to the restricted access to materials: avoiding criticism, fear of falsification and retraction, or a desire to stay ahead of peers. Commercial and proprietary concerns also play a significant role in the decision of scientists and organizations to conceal replication materials (Campbell & Bendavid,?2002; Hong & Walsh,?2009). Such motivations are more prominent as the line between academic and commercially oriented research becomes blurred. Nowadays, commercial firms commonly publish in scientific journals, whereas scientists, universities, and research institutions benefit from the commercialization of research findings and often seek patent protection. All of this cultivates an environment of secrecy, in contrast with the scientific tradition of openness and sharing (Merton,?1942)….
Instead of choosing between IP rights and replicability, we suggest an inclusive approach that facilitates replications without depriving scientists of IP rights. Our proposal is to implement a new policy tool: the Conditional Access Agreement (CAA). Recall that it is public access to replication materials that jeopardizes both the prospect of securing patent protection (as novelty and non-obviousness are examined vis-à-vis the public prior art) and trade secret protection (since the pertinent information must be kept out of the public domain). Access, however, does not have to be public. This is precisely the gist of the CAA mechanism—establishing a private, controlled channel of communication for the transfer of replication materials between authors and replicators….
The CAA mechanism would work as follows (Fig?1): When submitting a paper for publication, an author would execute an agreement vis-à-vis the journal, pledging to provide full access to replication materials upon demand. The agreement would specify that anyone requesting access to the materials can only obtain it upon signing a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). Under an NDA, the receiving party commits to use the information disclosed by the other party only for a limited purpose while keeping it confidential. …”
“From October to November, 2021, the pharmaceutical firms Merck and Pfizer licensed their new COVID-19 oral antiviral medications to the Medicines Patent Pool (MPP). In both cases, the drugs were licensed quickly, before they were launched, and the MPP then reached agreements with pharmaceutical firms across the globe (27 firms for Merck’s molnupiravir and 36 firms for Pfizer’s nirmatrelvir) to provide generic versions of these to roughly 100 low-income and middle-income countries. This Viewpoint examines the importance of these licences for the global production of, and access to, new medicines, during the pandemic and beyond. It would be a welcome development for these arrangements, which can generate sufficient volumes of production to avoid the supply shortages that encumbered the global vaccination response, to be an indication of a future in which new drugs have multiple suppliers in most low-income and middle-income countries. To explore that possibility, the Viewpoint highlights the political conditions that could make originator firms more inclined to license their products quickly to the MPP, and discusses how public policy can build on the opportunity created by these conditions to promote such licensing further….”
“From October to November, 2021, the pharmaceutical firms Merck and Pfizer licensed their new COVID-19 oral antiviral medications to the Medicines Patent Pool (MPP). In both cases, the drugs were licensed quickly, before they were launched, and the MPP then reached agreements with pharmaceutical firms across the globe (27 firms for Merck’s molnupiravir and 36 firms for Pfizer’s nirmatrelvir) to provide generic versions of these to roughly 100 low-income and middle-income countries. This Viewpoint examines the importance of these licences for the global production of, and access to, new medicines, during the pandemic and beyond. It would be a welcome development for these arrangements, which can generate sufficient volumes of production to avoid the supply shortages that encumbered the global vaccination response, to be an indication of a future in which new drugs have multiple suppliers in most low-income and middle-income countries. To explore that possibility, the Viewpoint highlights the political conditions that could make originator firms more inclined to license their products quickly to the MPP, and discusses how public policy can build on the opportunity created by these conditions to promote such licensing further….”
“On Monday 19 September, the ODIN secretariat and the Novo Nordisk Foundation are hosting a conference on Open Innovation in Science. The conference will take place in Copenhagen at the Novo Nordisk Foundation. Participation is free for all registered participants (max 150 seats)….”