of scientists’ own views of the trade-off involved
in IP protection of research tools.
Here we report scientists’ assessments
regarding the overall effects of IP protection,
as revealed in a survey of academic agricultural
biologists. Scientists believe that, contrary to the
current consensus, proliferation of IP protection
has a strongly negative effect on research in
their disciplines. Our respondents’ answers on
the details of access problems are highly consistent
with those reported in the recent literature,
but they ultimately relate these problems to the
proliferation of IP protection in academia.
Follow-up interviews, which recorded scientists’
extended accounts of selected cases, provide
further insights on how bench scientists
experience the negative effects of IP protection
(Supplementary Interviews online). They
attribute problems of delayed or blocked access
to needed research tools to material transfer
agreements (MTAs). Academic administrators
mandate use of MTAs to protect the value of the
IP rights held by their institutions or to reduce
their exposure to lawsuits by third parties. In
short, the major impediment to accessing
research tools is not patents per se, but patenting
as an institutional imperative in the post-
Bayh-Dole era.
Our respondents do not encounter an anticommons
or a patent thicket. Rather, they
believe that institutionally mandated MTAs put
sand in the wheels of a lively system of intradisciplinary
exchanges of research tools. Seeing
no countervailing effect on the supply of these
tools, they conclude that patenting impedes the
progress of research.
These findings challenge the inferences
of social scientists that there are no
real problems with policies encouraging
increased patenting of research tools. They
also help explain why agricultural biologists
have become leaders in the exploration