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Scientists’ perspectives concerning the effects of university patenting on the conduct of academic research in the life sciences

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Abstract

This paper explores scientists’ perspectives on the possible “unintended effects” of university patenting on the definition of academic research agendas, and the norms of open science. Based on a survey of life science researchers in Denmark, we found that a substantial proportion of scientists were skeptical about the impact of university patenting. The most skeptical respondents were scientists oriented towards basic research (particularly the less productive ones), recipients of research council grants, scientists with close relations to industry, and full professors. Highly productive scientists were less concerned. Our results have implications for understanding the ultimate success or failure of academic patenting policies, including how increased university patenting may be affecting how scientists conduct academic research.

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Notes

  1. The targeted university departments included most of the medical and veterinary departments in Denmark, and a wide range of natural science departments including biology, chemistry and agricultural science.

  2. For the survey as a whole (covering universities, hospitals and research organizations) we had 1,744 pre-identified, potential respondents, from which 581 questionnaire responses were received, for an overall response rate of 33%.

  3. Almost identical results were obtained by running the regressions on the two slightly larger samples of valid responses to the two questions separately (172 and 161 respondents, respectively).

  4. For scientists within this upper quartile of publication counts, differences in publication counts had no significant impact on the dependent variables examined in the study, suggesting that this is an appropriate threshold for identifying highly productive scientists.

  5. We also incorporated similar dummies to indicate other forms of interaction with industry, including contract research and consulting. These variables were not significant predictors of scientists’ perspectives and therefore left out of the final model.

  6. We controlled for additional factors that might be important. For example, scientists’ perspectives on university patenting may differ across research fields. Researchers specializing in medical science, for example, might be more positive towards patenting than researchers specializing in environmental biology, simply because research results from medical science are more readily applicable commercially. We controlled for this by including dummy variables for the biological sciences, medical sciences, and environmental biology. Agricultural biology constituted the reference group in the analysis. We also controlled for the location of the research units. As the greater Copenhagen hosts the largest Danish pharmaceutical companies, it might be easier for scientists to work with industry. Finally, we controlled for differences between individual research units by including dummies for departments with more than 10 respondents to the survey. None of these factors were significant, and were therefore omitted from the models.

  7. We also ran approximate likelihood-ratio tests of equality of coefficients across response categories on all models as well as Brant tests on each independent and control variable, to ensure that none of the models or variables violated the proportional odds assumption.

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Acknowledgments

This project is part of an ongoing research program financed by the Danish Social Sciences Research Council, Competence, Organisation and Management in Biotech Industries (COMBI), directed by Finn Valentin, at the Research Centre on Biotech Business, Copenhagen Business School, whose support we gratefully acknowledge. We would also like to thank Peter Abell, Keld Laursen, Toke Reichstein, Sidney Winter, Margaret Kyle, Bart Verspagen, Maryann Feldman, Ben Martin, Markus Perkmann, Peter Murmann, and two anonymous referees for useful comments and questions.

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  1. Department of Innovation and Organizational Economics, Copenhagen Business School, Kilevej 14A, 2000, Frederiksberg, Denmark

    Lee Davis & Peter Lotz

  2. DAMVAD, Badstuestræde 20, 1209, Copenhagen K, Denmark

    Maria Theresa Larsen

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Davis, L., Larsen, M.T. & Lotz, P. Scientists’ perspectives concerning the effects of university patenting on the conduct of academic research in the life sciences. J Technol Transf 36, 14–37 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-009-9142-2

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