UC Berkeley

Academia's usage of intellectual property (IP) has occasioned passionate debates on both sides. Supporters argue that it speeds the transfer of scientific discoveries to the private sector, and have advocated policies such as the Bayh-Dole Act to promote it. Detractors worry about the collision between the norms of science and the norms of commerce. They fear that the exclusionary rights of patents and licenses may fence off areas of research, making the costs to science outweigh the benefits from increased technology transfer. This dissertation addresses this empirically by testing whether the issuance of a license increases or decreases the flow of knowledge on that discovery, using citations to the focal publication(s) as a measure of knowledge flows.

In order to address this question, this dissertation first develops two intermediate results. The first is a primer on material transfer agreements which shows that they can be used as a proxy for research tools - an area where the conflict between scientific and commercial norms may be more significant. The second is to show that inventor-based matching, a new, automated methodology for matching intellectual property to its underlying scientific publication(s), can be used to construct a large dataset for this analysis.

Using these intermediate results and a non-parametric method for building a convincing control group, this dissertation finds two important results. First, it finds that, for most discoveries, licensing increases the flow of knowledge on that discovery. This is consistent with the license providing a positive signal about the discovery that benefits the underlying science. In contrast, this paper also finds that for research tools, licensing decreases the flow of knowledge on that discovery. This may indicate that licensed materials are being shared less widely amongst scientists, raising concerns about science progressing more slowly in these areas.