Slashdot Mirror
Student Researcher Wins Patent Dispute
Matthew writes: "For years, student researchers at universities have alleged that the hierarchical system in academic research allows supervising PhDs to steal and patent inventions that were rightfully discovered by students. The Federal Circuit finally addressed these concerns by interpreting the law in a way that strictly protects the rights of student researchers. As such, student researchers will now be able to sue their supervising PhDs for any actions that are not in the best interests of the student researcher or the patent rights of the student researcher."
The student' win is important, as it states the autonomy of the student in respect to his/her teacher/head. It is usual that head's names are added to scientific papers just because they are supervising the work of PhD students, even when supervision is just formal without real support to the student. The student, in such approach, is something like a slave, whose work is owned by the supervisor. The article says also that "...student researchers will now be able to sue their supervising PhDs for any actions that are not in the best interests of the student researcher", which gives supervision a more strong and formally bounded meaning, possibly increasing the quality of supervision itself and thus the benefits for the students.
All this is going to do is make students have to sign of their rights to patents and research, just like those of us in the real world do.
Wouldn't it be nice if schools got all the money they wanted and the army had to hold jumble sales for guns
As it stands, if you can copy, and get away with it, you get the bit of paper. If the supervisor then wants to try patenting the idea, it's -them- that's heading for the boiling oil.
If the researchers might actually -earn- something off their work, then copying doesn't cut the mustard, and some real work might get done for a change.
However, we can't assume this. The reward system is not guaranteed to produce better work. Indeed, there is an excellent paper over on www.gnu.org that describes research which shows that the reward system can actually CRIPPLE real innovation and imagination.
Personally, I think that if Microsoft's fortune were split between America's schools, colleges and Universities, they'd be able to reduce the fees enough to have students to teach, and be able to pay teachers enough for them to have no desire to steal their student's work.
(With enough funding, America is capable of getting 60-70% of the population into higher education. If each of those people produced one piece of useful, innovative work, which was then their own to licence or free as they wished, could you imagine how far America could go in the next ten years?)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Chou was suing to be *included* on the patent, not to become the new patent holder. In reality, the patent goes to the University which payed for all the equipment, allowed the research at its facility, etc. But the student is entitled to some of the royalties because they were a major part of the research. The faculty-member would still, rightfully so, have their name at the top of the paper. This faculty-member stepped too far, however, and made his name the ONLY one at the top of the paper.
--- Don't be a player hater: I meta-mod ALL negative mods as Unfair.
As a co-inventor on US Patent# 5,331,222 (which has turned out to be basically worthless ;), I'd like to suggest to graduate students that they ask around as to whether a research advisor is proactive in getting students names on research papers, patents, etc., or whether they are not.
I've had the luck to work for two professors who were very pro-active about getting student names on papers and patents.
It is an unfortunate reality that the goals and motivations of professors are not always aligned with their graduate students. A professor, even one that places their students interest as a priority, usually spends the majority of his time chasing funding. Most universities take ~50% of each grant to support facilities and non-research staff and there is a significant amount of pressure on the professor coming from his own department to acquire funding. This requires a large effort publishing, speaking, and writing grants. In a PR sense, the professor is selling himself and the granting institutions and the world at large view his laboratory and students as an extension of the professor. Optimally, the student graduates with a good education, solid research experience, and a few publications from a lab with an established track record. This is the best case scenario.
Unfortunately, dwindling grant sources have placed even more pressure on the acquisition of funding. The universities view patent royalties as a viable alternative to grants within technological fields and most have "technology transfer" groups specializing in harvesting intellectual property from labs and transforming it into funds. This system effectively funnels discovery from a large number of faculty, staff, and students into business group independent of the inventors. Students seldom gain any profit from these activities. Furthermore, not all professors give priority to their mentoring resposibility. On the contrary, many professors treat students as temporary low wage labor to be used to generate data (to publish, write grants, aquire funding, hire students...). Even students writing grants are seldom given intellectual credit within their field. Credit is reserved for the professor by default and even a conscientious professor usually has difficulty time distributing credit.
A graduate student's long years of toil used to be rewarded with an academic position. Professors and students justified the inbalaces of credit a temporary phase within an academic career. This has changed. Today, academic opportunities are far more limited and a student is fare less likely to remain within academia. As a result, the student has in fact become temporary low cost labor. More conflicts will occur as students recognize this.
First entomology, then virology, and finally bioinformatics systems. Bugs follow me wherever I go.
First, let me say I read the judgement quickly and the specific details ofthe case indicate the student's advisor was slime and deserved stiff punishment.
However, I am posting because of the tone of many posts on this topic that imply that advisors routinely assume unjustified credit for the work their supervised students do.
I strongly disagree with that, and my experience as both a grad student and a professor gives me quite alot of experience in this area. I am a computer scientist and do systems research, which strongly selects for group work, so that is a factor here, but it is also a major area of dispute with respect to credit in this thread of discussion.
First, the student is not working in a vacuum. The assumption that the student is solely repsonsible for whatever they do it almost always nonsense. They join a lab engaged in an area of research. Their (slavish) salary is paid for by $$$ raised by the professor. Trust me, I did *not* get my PhD for the pleasure of writing grant proposals. Raising money is a painful way to spend time, but one cannot pursue most research ideas without it, and most students (me included) would not *get* their PhDs without a research project to fund them.
So, at the first level, the student's ideas are born in the context of the research group, group meeting discussions, and usually regular meetings with the professor.
Beyond that, most often the research topic is formulated in cooperation with the advisor, if not actually suggested by the advisor. Then the research is conducted under regular review and guidance by the advisor. All of this is a *lot* of work, **for the advisor**,and often goes more slowly than the advisor could do it themselves, but that is the process of education.I am happy to do it, but claiming that I am not contributing to both the idea being developed and to the student's education is simply not true.
However, when the student has an impulse (as I did when a student) to exclaim "Hey! Why should you be an author on this paper, I did all the work!" there is a simple test.
Consider the work that was done, and the group of people that worked on it. Now consider that same work and group as you subtract each individual from the group in turn and ask:
1) Would the work have turned out substantially
the same without the absent person
2) Could the "subtracted" individual have done
the work on their own
Without exception for my projects in the last 8 years the answer to #1 vis a vis the student is YES, I could have done the work myself or supervising another student, and the project would have turned out essentially the same. The answer to #2 is NO, the student would not have had a snowball's chance in hell of having the idea or of implmenting it on their own.
At this point in the conversationt they usually blush to some degree and agree that my being a co-author on the paper describing "their" work is entirely appropriate. About half of them suggest I should be the first author, but I follow the custom of putting the student's names first.
There are studnets that come up with a brilliant idea and develop it on their own. Then a sole-author paper is appropriate. Most of the time, given the discussion above, I would say that sole authorship is not justified.
To close the loop on the original issue, sole authorship by the professor is not appropriate either, unless the student literally ran all experiments as specified byt he professor solely for a salary.
I hope this made sense and seems reasonable but if not I will don my asbestos suit.....