آیا حقوق مالکیت معنوی رسمی مانع از جریان آزاد دانش علمی می شود؟: یک آزمون تجربی از فرضیه ضد ویکیپدیا

Although many scholars suggest that IPR has a positive effect on cumulative innovation, a growing “anti-commons” perspective highlights the negative role of IPR over scientific knowledge. At its core, this debate is centered on how intellectual property rights over a given piece of knowledge affect the propensity of future researchers to build upon that knowledge in their own scientific research activities. This article frames this issue around the concept of dual knowledge, in which a single discovery may contribute to both scientific research and useful commercial applications, and finds evidence for a modest anti-commons effect. A key implication of dual knowledge is that it may be simultaneously instantiated as a scientific research article and as a patent. Such patent-paper pairs are at the heart of our empirical strategy. We exploit the fact that patents are granted with a substantial lag, often many years after the knowledge is initially disclosed through paper publication. The knowledge associated with a patent-paper pair therefore diffuses within two distinct intellectual property environments, one associated with the pre-grant period and another after formal IP rights are granted. Relative to the expected citation pattern for publications with a given quality level, the anti-commons perspective suggests that the citation rate for a scientific publication should fall after formal IP rights associated with that publication are granted. Employing a differences-in-differences estimator for 169 patent-paper pairs (and including a control group of other publications from the same journal for which no patent is granted), we find evidence for a modest anti-commons effect (the citation rate after the patent grant declines by approximately 10 to 20 percent). This decline becomes more pronounced with the number of years elapsed since the date of the patent grant and is particularly salient for articles authored by researchers with public sector affiliations.

In the early 1980s, Professor Philip Leder, recently recruited to head the new Genetics department at the Harvard Medical School, developed the first genetically engineered mouse with cancer, dubbed the Oncomouse. Leder and his post-doc Tim Stewart had used novel transgenic techniques to insert an oncogene into a mouse embryo; the result was a mouse that was highly susceptible to cancer. In his pursuit of a deeper understanding of cancer, Leder came to recognize that “it could serve a variety of different purposes, some purely scientific others highly practical” (Kelves, 2002, p. 83). This research was published in Cell in 1984, and in 1988 a broad patent for the Oncomouse was granted by the US Patent Office (USPTO). The Oncomouse patent was more controversial than most; not only was the Oncomouse the first living mammal to be patented, but Du Pont, as the patent's exclusive licensee, aggressively enforced the property rights. Du Pont's strategy included demands for “reach-through” rights and review of publications that used the Oncomouse in further scientific research ( Murray, 2006). Ideas that are simultaneously of value as a scientific discovery and inventive construct, such as the Oncomouse, are frequently generated in the disciplines that underpin modern biotechnology ( Stokes, 1997). Dual-purpose ideas provide their originators with multiple disclosure choices, including an option to publish research in the scientific literature and obtain intellectual property rights (IPR) over that knowledge. In academia, an increasing number of scientists have chosen this path of dual knowledge disclosure, which we describe as patent-paper pairs ( Murray, 2002 and Ducor, 2000). Patent-paper pairs are scientific articles and individual patents that disclose (and serve as a property right over) the same underlying “piece” of knowledge. Patent-paper pairs are thus more than simply a reflection of the rise in patenting by academics of knowledge unrelated (or only tangentially related) to their scientific research. Rather, by embedding the same piece of knowledge in two distinct institutional regimes, patent-paper pairs instantiate the expansion of formal intellectual property rights over knowledge that was traditionally disseminated solely through the norms of scientific publication. The increased use of intellectual property rights (IPR) in scientific research has sparked a vigorous academic and policy debate. On the one hand, a significant amount of research has highlighted the benefits of IPR (Kitch, 1977 and Arora et al., 2001). Recent empirical research on commercial discoveries suggests that IPR may facilitate the creation of a market for ideas, encourage further investment in ideas with commercial potential, and mitigate disincentives to disclose and exchange knowledge which might otherwise remain secret (Merges and Nelson, 1990, Merges and Nelson, 1994, Arora et al., 2001 and Gans and Stern, 2000). Indeed, within the context of university research (particularly publicly funded university research), it has been suggested that IPR offers important incentives to move nascent discoveries out of the “ivory tower” and into commercial practice. In other words, IPR may enhance the ability of society to realize the commercial and social benefits of a given discovery (Kitch, 1977 and Hellman, 2007). However, a more recent “anti-commons” perspective argues that the expansion of IPR (in the form of patents and/or copyrights) is “privatizing” the scientific commons and limiting scientific progress (Heller and Eisenberg, 1998, Argyres and Liebskind, 1998 and David, 2001b). Specifically, the anti-commons hypothesis states that IPR may inhibit the free flow and diffusion of scientific knowledge and the ability of researchers to build cumulatively on each other's discoveries (Heller and Eisenberg, 1998, David, 2003, David, 2000, Lessig, 2002, Etzkowitz, 1998 and Krimsky, 2003). Taken together, the impact of IPR on future progress in the broader scientific community remains open to debate. Building on several key case examples in the literature, this article frames this debate around the concept of dual knowledge as instantiated in patent-paper pairs. Within this framework we then report a novel empirical strategy to evaluate the salience of IPR on the cumulative impact of scientific knowledge. Our strategy exploits the existence of patent-paper pairs as both the instantiation of the expansion of intellectual property rights over dual knowledge and as a concrete empirical starting point from which to identify the impact of such rights on the rate of scientific knowledge diffusion. Our approach is to compare patterns of scientific citations to scientific articles that are part of patent-paper pairs, relative to citation patterns for articles that are not part of a patent-paper pair (but are similar along other dimensions). This allows us to evaluate several key hypotheses at the center of the anti-commons debate. First, we evaluate whether citation patterns are different for scientific research that is ultimately patented. In other words, to what extent does published scientific knowledge disclosed as a patent-paper pair differ in its future cumulative impact on public domain research (as measured by forward citations to the publication) from papers that are similar in topic, published in the same journal in the same time period, but never receive IPR? Second, we take advantage of patent grant delay. While publication lags are usually modest (on the order of a few months), patent grant delays are substantial (in most cases IPR is granted 2–4 years after initial application). Consequently, scientific knowledge associated with a patent-paper pair diffuses under two distinctive institutional environments, a pre-grant period where no IP rights are present and a post-grant period in which specific property rights have been granted. To the extent that a patent grant comes as a “surprise” to at least some potential follow-on researchers, this difference allows us to ask how does the grant of formal patent rights over such knowledge influence the trajectory of forward citations and therefore the impact of the scientific research findings in the public domain. The “experiment” afforded by the combination of patent-paper pairs and patent grant delay allows for a set of precise tests motivated by the anti-commons perspective: if the grant of intellectual property hinders the ability of researchers to build (in the public domain) on a given piece of knowledge, and the patent grant itself is “news” to the broader scientific community, then the citation rate to the scientific publication disclosing that knowledge should be lower than for scientific publications with no IP and should fall after formal property rights are granted. Of course, such an analysis must control for the fact that citation patterns vary with the underlying quality of the article and with the time elapsed since publication. Our use of patent grant delay allows us to do so. Specifically, by observing a given piece of knowledge in two different institutional environments, we are able to evaluate how differences in the institutional environment affect the diffusion of a given piece of knowledge, including a fixed effect for each article in our sample. To evaluate the anti-commons hypothesis, we examine how the grant of IPR changes the citation rate to scientific articles, accounting for fixed differences in citation rates across articles and relative to the trend in citation rates for articles with similar characteristics. The analysis employs two distinct (and complementary) approaches to the identification of the impact of patent grant on scientific citation. In the bulk of the analysis, we evaluate how the citation rate changes after patent grant, controlling for the trend in citation identified by articles that do not receive IPR. Moreover, to address the potential for selection of articles into patenting, we also explore a more nuanced empirical strategy that exploits the variation in patent grant delay among patented articles. Specifically, we examine the impact of patent grant on scientific citation relying exclusively on differences across patented articles in the time it takes to receive a patent. Overall, our approach employs a differences-in-differences estimator to evaluate the impact of IPR on the diffusion of scientific knowledge. Our sample is composed of 340 peer-reviewed scientific articles appearing between 1997 and 1999 in Nature Biotechnology, a high-quality scientific publication and perhaps the leading publication for research exhibiting knowledge duality in the life sciences. The incidence of patent-paper pairs is quite high within this sample: for just under 50 percent of the scientific articles in our sample, a US patent has been granted over the knowledge covered in that publication. For those articles that ultimately receive a patent, there is a significant lag between scientific publication and patent grant (on average, more than 3 years). We exploit these data to establish three core findings. First, published articles also associated with formal IP are more highly cited than those whose authors choose not to file for patents; however, most of this boost is accounted for by observed characteristics such as author location and number of authors on the article. Second, there is robust evidence for a quantitatively modest but statistically significant anti-commons effect; across different specifications, the article citation rate declines by approximately 10 to 20 percent after a patent grant. Third, the anti-commons effect is particularly salient for articles with public sector co-authors. We would like to be cautious in our interpretation. On the one hand, though the size of the effect is modest, the approach and results do seem to provide empirical evidence consistent with the anti-commons effect. With that said, the use of citation data is only a noisy indicator of the impact of any given piece of research, and our approach does not separately identify any potentially positive impact of IPR on research incentives (from the perspective of the original inventor). Moreover, we have not identified the specific institutional mechanism by which patent grant both surprises and influences researcher behavior. For example, as suggested by qualitative research, it is possible that the reduction in citation after patent grant does not arise from IPR per se but from how IP rights are enforced in specific circumstances. Example of this scenario include onerous licensing terms and delays associated with bargaining and negotiation over material transfer agreements among research organizations ( Walsh et al., 2003, Walsh et al., 2005 and Murray, 2006). The remainder of the paper is as follows. The next section reviews the economic foundations of our understanding of the impact of IPR on scientific knowledge and lays out the specific anti-commons hypothesis, framed around the nature and institutional foundations of dual knowledge. Section 3 develops the empirical test and predictions of the anti-commons hypothesis. After a review of the data in Section 4, Section 5 presents our empirical findings. We conclude with implications for future empirical work and innovation policy in Pasteur's Quadrant.