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Freeing the Good Stuff From University Labs
netbuzz writes "University research labs are not supposed to be like Vegas: What happens in them is not supposed to stay there. A nonprofit from the Kauffman Innovation Network launching yesterday at DEMO 07 aims to free the fruits of academic research that would otherwise sit trapped on university shelves. Bonus: the site translates academic-speak into English.
I'm a lawyer who (among other things) advises startups who want to license discoveries from universities. There is already a thriving market in such research, thanks in large part to the Bayh-Dole act, which allows universities to exploit inventions funded by the US government. The gov't gets a non-exclusive right to practice the invention (or have it practiced for the government) and there are a few other relatively minor restrictions. Because of this, Universities have been mining their research for years. Especially in the biochem and biotech industries, the vegas-like attitude does not exist. Quite the opposite -- researchers typically now conduct their research with an eye toward its commercial practicability. Before Bayh-Dole, this rarely happened.
The Bayh-Dole Act ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh-Dole_Act ) confers univeristies the IP rights to their discoveries.
P226
The iBridge Network aggregates research materials, technologies and discoveries into an online, easy-to-search forum. Through the iBridge Web site, researchers and commercial end users can find what they need by using community tagging and open interfaces -- and then obtain the materials via e-commerce.
Sounds like the put up a bunch of research paper links, allow tagging, search and a forum and then once you click on the link -- and this is the best part -- you can obtain the material via "e-commerce", or by paying for it. I presume the "translated academic speak" feature is tagging and forums, which is hardly earth-shattering.
Also, there is a lot of research out there that simply cannot be reliably translated into lay speak. You can't take some research papers and condense it to "so yeah, send 12k of data through the pipe for best performance". There's a reason that academic papers are complicated, and believe me, it's not to confuse the public. And the papers on which you can translate reliably into layspeak are probably shit in the first place.
There's another site where you can access research papers (largely for free), citation lists, bibtex entries: Google scholar. Also, CiteSeer. Sure, there's no forums, but then there's Usenet and the age-old technique of email-the-author (actually works sometimes).
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
so you think the situation under bayh-dole where the university is supposed to be
legally obliged to patent it and license it is really much better? do you know what
its like to have your phd work sold off to the higest bidder before you can even
finish it and get your doctorate? to have university lawyer sniffing around your
work area looking for things that might be patentable. to not be able to open
source simple tools because something thinks they are required to try and sell them
off? to have to have your academic papers reviewed by techical lawyers as if you
were in a company?
commericalization does get some fruits of research in front on the public that may
not have bene otherwise, but its also in almost direct opposition to the normal
academic model of frank and open discussion.