Re: "junior" authorship

From: Dan L Burk <BURKDANL[_at_]shu.edu>
Date: Mon, 03 Aug 1998 16:33:24 -0400

On 7/31/98, Diane Cabell <cabell[_at_]mama-tech.com> wrote:
>
> The tradition evolved this way because US universities (the
> traditional source of scientific research) are under an obligation
> to make public their results, so they did not traditionally protect
> their ideas via patent or trade secret. Nevertheless, it is the
> ideas and the technical competence of the research that are valued
> by academics, not the expression of it.

I agree with much of Diane's reply, but am uncertain about her assertion that universities "traditionally" did not protect research via patent. There is a fairly long tradition of robust university patenting in the chemical arts, with which I am most familiar, and I am given to understand that this was traditionally even more common for the electrical arts. She may be thinking primarily about biomedical research, which has become a focus of university patenting over the last 20 years.

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Dan L. Burk
Seton Hall University
burkdanl[_at_]shu.edu

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Received on Mon Aug 03 1998 - 20:29:56 GMT