Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
disclosure. The trade-off is between disclosure and the obtained protected
interest, either a “moral right” in recognition and citation from a peer-reviewed
article or in the right to exploit granted by a patent. The key decisions made
here are when to disclose based on the legal framework, potential losses
through not disclosing (e.g., by being “scooped” by a competitor gaining fi rst
publication), and the potential for identifying important additional informa-
tion or collaborators through publication.
These are precisely the same issues associated with publication to the wider
Internet. The key differences are that much greater granularity of “publica-
tion” is possible, with choices ranging from publication to a group, an organiza-
tion, a community, or the world, and that the potential benefi ts in publication,
unexpected insights, or connections to arise are much greater. This is, as it has
always been, a risk assessment. What are the likely benefi ts and likely risks of
different forms of publication. And, increasingly, what are the likely risks of
not
publishing in some form?
A risk management approach and the added range of options provided by
the Internet mean that different solutions are likely to be most effective in
different spaces. An explicit aim of SAGE Bionetworks (described earlier) is
to make disease biology a precompetitive space by aggregating large quanti-
ties of valuable data in the public domain. The capital costs, and therefore the
fi nancial risks, of obtaining large volumes of high-quality disease or biology
data are now so high that they pose a threat even to large pharmaceutical
companies. The potential benefi ts in pooling these data to identify new poten-
tial treatment targets are huge. There is therefore likely to be a signifi cant
move toward more open publishing of disease biology data—and the growth
of a range of business and academic opportunities around the curation and
critical analysis of that data. At the other extreme, at the core of most drug
patents, are specifi c compounds and their formulation. It is unlikely that such
specifi c information on fi nal stage development products will be published
transparently prior to patent disclosure in the immediate future. Toxicology
data on failed compounds fall perhaps somewhere in the middle.
What is clear is that to fully exploit the potential of the Web to support
unexpected innovation and adventitious discovery requires a greater degree
of open publication than is traditional in drug discovery. The potential for
more effective and effi cient fl ow of information is enormous. In an area where
there is signifi cant money to be made, this implies there is a signifi cant market
opportunity for the development of tools and approaches that take advantage
of that potential. These tools will provide the technical and legal infrastructure
that provides confi dence about the level of sharing that is going on and con-
fi dence about the rights of parties to use or reuse information. High granular
sharing (and easy publication) settings on collaborative author environments
and widely used and legally respected patent licenses and material transfer
agreements that provide clear rights and where appropriate limitations to
those rights are likely to play a role here (http://sciencecommons.org/projects/
patent - licenses/ ).
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