News by Subject Policy & Ethics

Patent law experts demonstrate that private-public partnerships lead to promising innovation output measured in patents. Collaborations between private entities and public institutions have the potential to improve technology transfer in nanotechnology. Nations entering the nano-space can capitalize on collaborative environments, developing frameworks and close institutional networks between entities active in nanotechnology.

New research by Bocconi University's Mariano Max Croce and colleagues finds that public debt is bad for growth also because it hinders innovative firms' investment. 'By affecting their cost of capital, movements in government debt impact firms' investment and, critically, innovation decisions,' Professor Croce says. The net result is a GDP growth drop in four to five years, when the lack of innovation starts to affect the national economy.

Routes to making life-saving medications and other pharmaceutical compounds are among the most carefully protected trade secrets in global industry. Building on recent work programming computers to identify synthetic pathways leading to pharmaceutically complex molecules, researchers in Poland and South Korea have unveiled computerized methods to suggest only synthetic strategies that bypass patent-protected aspects of essential drugs. Their work appears Jan. 17, 2019, in the journal Chem.

Plant breeders at the University of Göttingen and Agrecol have launched a joint initiative to protect seeds as common property. Agrecol developed an 'Open Source Seed Licence,' which legally protects seeds as commons (i.e., a natural resource accessible to all members of society) and thus protects them from patenting and similar issues such as 'plant variety protection.' The results were published in the journal PLOS Biology.

New research publishing Nov. 20 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology from Joshua Wallach, Kevin Boyack, and John Ioannidis suggests that progress has been made in key areas of research transparency and reproducibility. The authors randomly sampled biomedical journal articles published between 2015 and 2017 and assessed measures of reproducibility and transparency.