Week 4. Resource sharing, collaboration, and intellectual property

Scientific research is often highly technical and specialized, so particular laboratories and individuals may have unique skills, abilities or resources. Hence, it is often effective to establish collaborations among laboratories to bring a variety of approaches to bear on a question. How can collaborations be established and conducted to provide the greatest benefits to the laboratories and to provide the most rapid development and distribution of scientific insights?

In addition, science is a communal activity and progress occurs as experiments are replicated and ideas become accepted. One aspect of laboratory science is the generation of resources - data bases, sequence data, antibodies, chemicals, cell lines, and other tools. How and when should these resources be shared?

Collaborations and resource sharing have a major feature in common: a resource leaves the laboratory which generated it. However, a collaboration includes many additional features. The two major distinctions are that a collaboration is reciprocal, and that a collaboration involves the combining of intellectual resources of the two laboratories in a mutual endeavor. Intrinsic reciprocity and intellectual involvement in a collaboration lead to the major considerations in thinking about how a collaboration might be organized.

Secrecy is viewed as antithetical to the academic scientific enterprise. Can an observation or interpretation be “scientific” if it is not made public, or if the methods used to make an observation are kept secret? Two additional attitudes opposing secrecy are also common in the scientific community: that scientific knowledge is a common resource and should be equally available to all individuals and that progress in the collective scientific enterprise is facilitated by rapid and full dissemination of results.

However, there are also reasons for allowing some secrecy of your own work. It is accepted that a scientist will actively avoid telling others about data or ideas in some situations. Confidentiality is often viewed as appropriate when an idea has been formulated but not yet tested. Even when the initial “preliminary” results are obtained, some degree of confidentiality is usually seen as appropriate. It can be argued that the results might be confusing or incorrect, or that the individual scientist deserves some quiet and privacy to finish up a project. It is also accepted that a scientist may keep secret the results of another person’s work, under similar circumstances.

Resource Sharing

Is there an obligation to distribute resources?
Is the obligation greater if they are required to replicate results which you have published?
When should they be distributed (i.e. before or after publication)?
To whom should they be distributed (your friends, your enemies, people in your lab)?
Who should decide when and with whom to share (the tech who made the cell line, the student using it for thesis research, a collaborator, the principal investigator)?
Can a funding source dictate a requirement for sharing or not (e.g. a company, the NIH)?
What obligations can be placed on sharing? (e.g. “Only if you do not do the following experiments...”, or “Only if you put the following names on any paper...”)?
What if the resource is limited or costly?
How can sharing be reconciled with commercial concerns (e.g. patenting)

Collaborations

How is credit apportioned for the common results?
How is responsibility assigned for the published work?
How is “reciprocity” defined and evaluated?
What limits are placed on the collaboration (the scope of the work included, the freedom of each lab to independently pursue results from the collaboration, the time at which the collaboration ends)?
How are tensions in the collaboration presented and resolved?

Intellectual Property

Who owns the data? (See the link under Readings for the Washington University policies on Intellectual Property)
When can you keep your own ideas or results confidential?
At what point is a scientist “required” to fully describe data?
Is it appropriate to keep results secret from coworkers in the laboratory?
In collaborations, when can you keep your own results secret?
What if commercial interests (i.e. patents, trade secrets) conflict with scientific openness?
Does the source of funding for research affect the confidentiality of your results?
When is it appropriate to keep results obtained by your coworkers secret?
Who should decide which results are confidential, and which should be discussed?
What expectations for confidentiality can a scientist expect from others in the laboratory?
When are you free to discuss results obtained in other labs?
Does it matter how you learn about the results (private lab meeting, open seminar, in a bar)?
Can confidentiality be negotiated?

Sample Scenarios

Readings