Do Formal Intellectual Property Rights Hinder the Free Flow of Scientific Knowledge? An Empirical Test of the Anti-Commons Hypothesis

Abstract

While the potential for intellectual property rights to inhibit the diffusion of scientific knowledge is at the heart of several contemporary policy debates, evidence for the "anti-commons effect" has been anecdotal. A central issue in this debate is how intellectual property rights over a given piece of knowledge affects the propensity of future researchers to build upon that knowledge in their own scientific research activities. This article frames this debate around the concept of dual knowledge, in which a single discovery may contribute to both scientific research and useful commercial applications. 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, anticommons theory predicts that the citation rate to a scientific publication should fall after formal IP rights associated with that publication are granted. Employing a differencesindifferences estimator for 169 patent-paper pairs (and including a control group of publications from the same journal for which no patent is granted), we find evidence for a modest anticommons effect (the citation rate after the patent grant declines by between 9 and 17%). 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.

Exploring the Foundations of Cumulative Innovation: Implications for Organization Science

“…In the life sciences, innovators in academia and industry may pursue dual routes of disclosure-simultaneously filing patent applications when an idea is disclosed in an academic publication. These "patent-paper" pairs disclose knowledge in two distinctive settings offering similar levels of disclosure but (as we will discuss below) quite different implications for access (Murray 2002, Murray andStern 2007).…”

“…Studies of knowledge networks often focus on individuals (e.g., Hansen 1999Hansen , 2002 and economic analyses focus on broad institutional conditions (Dasgupta andDavid 1994, Murray andStern 2007). Our framework considers how parties at multiple levels work together to enable (or stifle) the accumulation of knowledge.…”

“…The most widespread outcome variable is a citation count-either to publications (as measured using the ISI-Thomson Web of Science database) or to patents using the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office data. For example, in their study of the impact of patent grant on the citation rate of scientific publications, Murray and Stern (2007) measure forward citations to publications as a proxy of knowledge accumulation. Furman and Stern (2006) used the same measure in their study of BRCs.…”

Engaging the scholar: Three types of academic consulting and their impact on universities and industry

“…Second, secrecy issues might restrict publishing from industrial work, leading to a tension between the requirements of 'open science' and commercial appropriability considerations (Murray and Stern, 2007). This is especially relevant for consulting 14 activities where outputs usually belong to industrial clients.…”

Nanotechnology and the US national innovation system: continuity and change

“…Will university intellectual property regulations interfere with the free flow and exchange of information and research materials, either through patenting of inputs to science or through other restrictions on information exchange? 11 A substantial body of work has examined the effects of academic patenting on the flow of scientific information among researchers (Blumenthal et al 1997;Campbell et al 2002;Murray and Stern 2007;Sampat 2004;Walsh et al 2005;Lei et al 2009), and has reached a mixed verdict. On the one hand, publications covering discoveries that eventually are patented appear to experience a drop in citations after the patents issue, suggesting that the patents cause other researchers to direct their effort elsewhere.…”