Importance of Participant-Centricity and Trust for a Sustainable Medical Information Commons.

Drawing on a landscape analysis of existing data-sharing initiatives, in-depth interviews with expert stakeholders, and public deliberations with community advisory panels across the U.S., we describe features of the evolving medical information commons (MIC).

Creating a data resource: what will it take to build a medical information commons?

National and international public-private partnerships, consortia, and government initiatives are underway to collect and share genomic, personal, and healthcare data on a massive scale. Ideally, these efforts will contribute to the creation of a medical information commons (MIC), a comprehensive data resource that is widely available for both research and clinical uses. Stakeholder participation is essential in clarifying goals, deepening understanding of areas of complexity, and addressing long-standing policy concerns such as privacy and security and data ownership.

IMPROVING (SOFTWARE) PATENT QUALITY THROUGH THE ADMINISTRATIVE PROCESS.

The available evidence indicates that patent quality, particularly in the area of software, needs improvement. This Article argues that even an agency as institutionally constrained as the U.S.

Use patents can be useful: the case of rescued drugs.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, use patents can have both commercial and therapeutic value.

Accountability in patenting of federally funded research.

New data indicates substantial under-reporting of the existence of federal funding in academic biomedical patents issued since the enactment of the Bayh-Dole Act.

A kernel for open source drug discovery in tropical diseases.

Background: Conventional patent-based drug development incentives work badly for the developing world, where commercial markets are usually small to non-existent. For this reason, the past decade has seen extensive experimentation with alternative R&D institutions ranging from private-public partnerships to development prizes. Despite extensive discussion, however, one of the most promising avenues-open source drug discovery-has remained elusive.

University Software Ownership and Litigation: A First Examination.

Software patents and university-owned patents represent two of the most controversial intellectual property developments of the last twenty-five years. Despite this reality, and concerns that universities act as "patent trolls" when they assert software patents in litigation against successful commercializers, no scholar has systematically examined the ownership and litigation of university software patents. In this Article, we present the first such examination.

Is Bayh-Dole good for developing countries? Lessons from the US experience.

The US Bayh-Dole Act encourages university patenting of inventions arising from publicly funded research. Lessons from three decades of US experience serve as a cautionary tale for those countries that may choose to emulate Bayh-Dole.