Emerging Academic Scientists' Exclusionary Encounters with Commercialization Law, Policy, and Practice

• Author: Matthew Herder
• Pages: 459-480

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459

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Emerging Academic Scientists’ Exclusionary

Encounters with Commercialization Law,

Policy, and Practice

 

 : Academic laboratories are, increasingly, sites of commer-

cialization. While empirical evidence about the impact of the emphasis

placed upon commercialization by governments, research funding agencies,

and research institutions, and the attendant growth of commercialization

activities in the academic sphere has been gradually accumulating, much of

this evidence is tied to established academic scientists. Comparatively little

empirical research has focused upon emerging academic scientists. There-

fore, the purpose of this chapter is to identify a set of concerns owing from

emerging academic scientists’ encounters with commercialization laws,

policies, and practices. The chapter proceeds in three parts. In Section B, I

describe contextual changes related to commercialization in the academic

realm as well as a range of commercialization activities that emerging scien-

tists are increasingly apt to be exposed to as they pursue scientic careers.

In Section C, I identify two “exclusionary encounters” that emerging scien-

tists are likely to have with commercialization laws, policies, and practices.

These encounters pertain to 1) inventorship of patentable discoveries, and 2)

intellectual property ownership. By way of brief conclusion in Section D, I set

out one hypothesis for future empirical inquiry.

: Les laboratoires universitaires sont de plus en plus des sites

de commercialisation. Bien que la preuve empirique au sujet de l’impact de

l’accent placé sur la commercialisation par les gouvernements, les agences

de nancement de la recherche, et les institutions de recherche, de même

460 •  

que la preuve concernant la croissance corrélative des activités de commer-

cialisation dans le monde universitaire s’accumulent graduellement, elles

se rapportent surtout aux scientiques universitaires établis. Peu de re-

cherches empiriques se sont concentrées sur les scientiques universitaires

émergents. L’objet de ce chapitre est donc d’identier une série de préoc-

cupations découlant de l’application aux scientiques universitaires émer-

gents des lois, des politiques et des pratiques de commercialisation. Ce

chapitre est divisé en trois parties. Dans la Partie A, l’auteur décrit les chan-

gements contextuels relatifs à la commercialisation dans le milieu univer-

sitaire, ainsi qu’une gamme d’activités de commercialisation auxquelles les

scientiques émergents sont de plus en plus susceptibles d’être confrontés

dans le cadre de leur carrière scientique. Dans la Partie B, l’auteur identie

deux «situations d’exclusion» que les scientiques émergents auront pro-

bablement à vivre en raison des lois, politiques et pratiques de commerciali-

sation. Ces situations surviennent lors de 1) l’identication de l’inventeur de

découvertes brevetables, et 2) la détermination du titulaire de la propriété

intellectuelle. En guise de brève conclusion, la Partie C formule une hypo-

thèse pour une enquête empirique future.

A. INTRODUCTION

Academic laboratories are sites of not only great scientic but also social

inquiry. Following Robert Merton’s seminal work in the 1950s,1 sociologists,

anthropologists, historians, economists, and other scholars have set upon

studying the internal dynamics of academic laboratories and the structures,

institutions, and outside actors inltrating, inuencing, and complicating

laboratory environments. While important to situate commercially-ori-

ented research practices such as patenting within this broader range of

inuences that have and will continue to inuence academic science,2 the

1 See, for example, Robert K Merton, “Priorities in Scientic Discovery: A Chapter in the

Sociology of Science” (1957) 22 Am Soc Rev 635.

2 A standard response to those who express concerns about the commercialization of aca-

demic science is to ask whether the concerns in question are, in fact, more attributable

to long-standing norms of competition and secrecy within academic science. Part of the

empirical challenge, then, is to disentangle the various inuences upon the behaviours

and choices of academic scientists. See, for example, Wei Hong & John P Walsh “For

Money or Glory? Commercialization, Competition, and Secrecy in the Entrepreneurial

University” (2009) 50:1 Sociological Quarterly 145.