he freedom to investigate and publi

he freedom to investigate and publish supe-
rior knowledge about serious things is the

T

foundation of the scholarly professions

(Shils 1978). In western capitalist societies this

principle of scholarly privilege has been coupled to

the idea of private property. Researchers typically

not only claim property rights over the knowledge

they produce, but also proprietary rights over the

subject matter—the field of raw data—from which

they extracted their knowledge.