The Hidden Legal Barriers to Scientific Research
This commentary in the Genomics Law Report’s ongoing series What ELSI is New? is contributed by Thinh H. Nguyen, Creative Commons Counsel for Science Commons.
When thinking about the legal issues associated with genomics, many people, particularly lawyers, tend to focus on patent issues. While there are legitimate concerns about patents, there is a growing body of sociological research to suggest that in the vast majority of cases, bench science is not impeded by fear of patent lawsuits, but rather by far more mundane legal and cultural barriers.
Such barriers can arise from private agreements between the participants in the exchange. For example, material transfer agreements (“MTAs”), which are bailment agreements that often govern the exchange of reagents or biological specimens, continue to generate significant negotiation costs, delays, and failed instances of sharing, despite an NIH mandate more than a decade ago to simplify and standardize the process of sharing biological resources.
The sharing of scientific data and databases on the Web represents an important opportunity to accelerate the process of scientific discovery, but it also breeds a proliferation of legal forms, including click-through data use agreements, Website terms of use, and other restrictions that are not only bewildering to scientists but also to the lawyers who support them. The use of such restrictive agreements, often unnecessary, can present a significant problem for research projects that must depend on data aggregation or integration, an important tool of genomics research.
The increasing extent to which legal formalities, and thus lawyers, intermediate scientific sharing, not only between academia and industry but increasingly between academics themselves, represents a cultural sea-change with important consequences for how science is conducted in the future. The public and unrestricted availability of genomic databases and resources, or the “commons”, must be cultivated and defended, through a robust community consensus, or it can easily fragment into legally constructed “walled gardens” without public right of way.
[...] Thinh Nguyen, Creative Commons Counsel for Science Commons – The Hidden Legal Barriers to Scientific Research [...]
[...] latest edition of Genomics Law Report features a guest commentary on the roadblocks to knowledge sharing and scientific research, penned by Science Commons Counsel [...]
[...] latest edition of Genomics Law Report features a guest commentary on the roadblocks to knowledge sharing and scientific research, penned by Science Commons Counsel [...]
Social comments and analytics for this post…
This post was mentioned on Twitter by genomicslawyer: The Hidden Legal Barriers to Scientific Research: http://bit.ly/4kKbVn (from Thinh Nguyen of @ScienceCommons)…