The growing salience of intellectual property (IP) rights has reconfigured U.S. science, shifting it from the formerly separate realms of university and commercial science to an increasingly interconnected field of public and proprietary science. We assess both the magnitude and consequences of these developments, first describing the primary tools of IP and the changing nature of their influence on science, and then examining the effects of IP on the roles, rules, and relations of the scientific enterprise. We also consider the emergence of new models of scientific practice that blend both public and private. We debate whether current changes represent a transition or transformation in the relations between science and property. Finally, we argue that just as the public and private spheres of science may be converging, so must future scholarship if we are to answer harder questions about the appropriate balance between traditional logics of open science and the more recent regimes of proprietary science. 345 Annu. Rev. Law. Soc. Sci. 2007.3:345-373. Downloaded from arjournals.annualreviews.org by Stanford University Robert Crown Law Lib. on 05/17/08. For personal use only.Humanity needs practical men, who get the most out of their work, and, without forgetting the general good, safeguard their own interests. But humanity also needs dreamers, for whom the disinterested development of an enterprise is so captivating that it becomes impossible for them to devote their care to their own material profit . . . .[A] well-organized society should assure to such workers the efficient means of accomplishing their task, in a life freed from material care and freely consecrated to research.Marie Curie (1946) Rhoten · Powell
Engaged scholarship is an intellectual movement sweeping across higher education, not only in the social and behavioral sciences but also in fields of natural science and engineering. It is predicated on the idea that major advances in knowledge will transpire when scholars, while pursuing their research interests, also consider addressing the core problems confronting society. For a workable engaged agenda in science and technology studies, one that informs scholarship as well as shapes practice and policy, the traditional terms of engagement must be renegotiated to be more open and mutual than has historically characterized the nature of inquiry in this field. At the same time, it is essential to protect individual privacy and preserve government confidentiality. Yet there is a scientific possibility for and benefit to introducing more collaborative and deliberative research approaches between scholar and subject in ways that will not violate these first-order ethics. To make the case, this article discusses the possibilities and perils of engaged science and technology scholarship by drawing on our own recent experiences to conduct and apply STS research while embedded in the National Science Foundation. Brief accounts of these experiences reveal the opportunities as well as the challenges of engaged scholarship. They also provide lessons for those fellow travelers who might follow the authors to this or other like host organizations with ambitions of increasing fundamental knowledge about and applying research to the policies, programs, and decisions of the scientific enterprise.
Csikszentmihalyi (1999: 314) argues that 'creativity is a process that can be observed only at the intersection where individuals, domains, and fields intersect'. This article discusses the relationship between creativity and interdisciplinarity in science. It is specifically concerned with interdisciplinary collaboration, interrogating the processes that contribute to the collaborative creation of original ideas and the practices that enable creative integration of diverse domains. It draws on results from a novel real-world experiment in which small interdisciplinary groups of graduate students were tasked with producing an innovative scientific research problem and an integrative research proposal. Results show that while bisociative thinking assists in the creation of original research problems, both disciplinary skills and an interdisciplinary disposition are core to the integration of creative research proposals. Extrapolating from the results of this experiment, the article discusses the feasibility of preparing students for such work and the implications for universities and other intellectual centers.
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