Open IP Workgroup Report

Open Scholarship Initiative Proceedings, Volume 2, 2017, issn: 2473-6236 doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.13021/G8osi.1.2017.1935 Open IP Workgroup Report Joann Delenick, Donald Guy, Laurel Haak, Patrick Herron, Joyce Ogburn, Crispin Taylor Abstract / Workgroup Question As a new issue for OSI2017, this workgroup (originally designated as the Patent Literature workgroup) will look at patent literature, research reports, databases and other published information. OSI by design has a university-centric and journal-centric bias to the perspectives being considered. Patent literature, research reports, and databases are also important sources of research information—more so than journals in some disciplines (although these still reference journal articles). As with journal articles, this information isn’t always free or easy to find and is suffering from some of the same usability issues as journal articles. workgroup concentrated our efforts on I. Framing and Scoping developing recommendations relevant to improving the discovery, access and use From the beginning of our workgroup of patent data and closely-related IP. discussions, we realized that the scope of our assigned topic, patent literature, was too II. What is Open IP? narrow in comparison to the range of intellectual property specified in the topic In the context of our discussions, the assignment. With patent literature, re- concept of Open IP could certainly relate search reports, and databases in mind, we to ideas of open innovation; we recognize, looked at the topic as a broader continu- however, that intellectual property, espe- um of intellectual property (IP). Our cially when operating within scholarly group began by defining intellectual property domains, can far exceed its role as a foun- as the set of objects comprised of artifacts dation for commercial innovation. The created or otherwise contributed by re- patenting process is itself a tradeoff be- searchers that either potentially or pres- tween publishing and protection. To be ently are part of the scholarly record. This granted a patent requires the invention to broad definition led us to rethink our top- be published. Patent files are maintained ic and, in keeping with the conference as a public resource, by national and theme of open scholarship, rename it as transnational organizations. The group Open IP. Further workgroup discussion agreed that one of the major challenges is revealed that, beyond patents, many types that while the patent files are openly ac- of IP lacked information on existing mod- cessible, they are not easily used due to els, structures, workflows, or standards, structural issues in the way the data is col- highlighting the need for more time- lected and the file is constructed and pre- consuming exploration and concept de- sented. This makes it difficult to under- velopment. Despite the expanded scope stand who are the inventors and assignees, of interest, due to time constraints our which in turn has an impact on our ability © 2017 OSI2017 Open IP Workgroup. This open access article is distributed under the Creative Com- mons Attribution 4.0 International License. This document reflects the combined input of the authors listed here (in alphabetical order by last name) as well as contributions from other OSI2017 delegates. The findings and recommendations expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the individual authors listed here, nor their agencies, trustees, officers, or staff. Open Scholarship Initiative Proceedings, Volume 2, 2017 2 to track innovation and develop policies licensing, and included content types, to better support innovation. principles, standards, stakeholders and incentives. We talked briefly about recent Given that patent files are openly accessi- literature regarding the content of scholar- ble, another discussion thread was how ship and the scholarly record, referencing Open IP might be practiced. This relates the OCLC report on The Evolving Schol- to but is different from licensing of IP. It arly Record3 and NISO’s work on stand- is possible for organizations, as Tesla and ards and best practices.4. We also deter- NASA have demonstrated, to implement mined that we would consider all digital open patenting practices. As a federal formats of scholarship. government agency of the United States, NASA has a public domain collection of Our workgroup first identified a set of IP available to users, and has created a principles and values appropriate for mak- website to facilitate the transfer and trans- ing and evaluating recommendations, lation of their open technology portfolio.1 leading to an effort to create an inventory In private Industry, Tesla has opened the of contemporary or potential types of in- licensing of their patents, citing the greater tellectual property. These two initial dis- advantage of finding engineers already cussions led to a greater discussion of familiar with Tesla’s technology over the scholarly communications, stakeholders, restricted use of their patents. Tesla claims incentives, standards and practices, setting they innovate much too quickly for in- the path for making recommendations. fringement of their patents or patentable technologies to harm their firm in a sub- A. Guiding Principles and Values for stantive way 2 Both organizations argue Open IP that opening their patentable research ac- The group quickly agreed that the elucida- celerates knowledge production that sim- tion of fundamental Open IP principles ultaneously serves the interests of the in- would be an important first step toward dividual organizations, educational and exploring this topic. The group thought training institutions, workers such as sci- that a combination of open and public entists and engineers, and the broader domain principles should apply both to public interest. While opening patent li- content as well as the computational ana- censing in the ways such examples illus- lytics developed to understand such con- trate may have a number of advantages tent. One reason for this is because con- concurrent with the goals of open schol- tent is increasingly valuable for use in dis- arship, the scope of our interest is current- covery and content creation applications ly limited to the opening of IP-related da- in medicine, the pharmaceutical industry, ta. engineering, and even in the humanities and arts. Moreover, we observed that ana- III. Discussions lytics are becoming essential for critical computational analysis tasks such as dis- Several ideas and frameworks emerged ambiguation, text structuring, and basic soon after we started that helped us shape bibliometrics, scientometrics, infometrics, and hone our discussions and potential and altmetrics. In response to these ideas, recommendations. These centered on the we developed the principles noted below accessibility of documents rather than on in Table 1. www.journals.gmu.edu/osi Open Scholarship Initiative Proceedings, Volume 2, 2017 3 Guiding Principles and Values for Open IP Accessible Discoverable as academic content Interoperable Machine-readable optimization for non-consumptive use Text and data mining Persistent, i.e., long-term availability in the scholarly record Pragmatic Global in scope and perspective Generalizable Multidisciplinary Stakeholder commitment to Open IP Anticipatory, forward looking toward new developments and concepts Table 1. Guiding Principles of this workgroup; and distal, i.e., objects B. Open IP Content Types, Intellectu- less likely to be equated with patent- al Outputs, and Creative Activities centric notions of IP, and hence more We enumerated types of intellectual prop- challenging to make recommendations for erty and added them to either of two openness. Table 2 below contains a list of groups: proximal, i.e., those objects not intellectual property types we identified. only more likely to be thought of as IP but also more likely to be within the scope Proximal Types of IP Distal Types of IP Patents (including design) Archives Patent-related specimen and materials repositories Artifact and biological collections Databases and datasets Art installations Software Blogs Clinical trials Court testimony/opinions Research reports Expert panel Regulatory government filings Peer review Grant abstracts/proposals Analytics Technical specifications Music Simulations Tweets and other social media posts Games Interactives Algorithms Trade secrets Copyright www.journals.gmu.edu/osi Open Scholarship Initiative Proceedings, Volume 2, 2017 4 Proximal Types of IP Distal Types of IP Trademarks Virtual and augmented reality Table 2. Types of IP papers alike it is often difficult to integrate C. Differences between Patent Litera- and incorporate resources from both ture and Scholarly Research Literature types of literature. Scholarly research literature is generally well-structured digitally, and such struc- The increasing adoption of metadata tures are becoming widely standardized, standards and discovery technologies, which greatly aids discoverability, utility, such as open crosswalks, open APIs, per- and interoperability. Both content and sistent identifiers, and controlled vocabu- standards are often distributed by digital laries, helps stakeholders connect to siloed means, thereby making them at least po- information and data types. Improve- tentially more readily discoverable than ments to open crosswalks and APIs be- other types of scholarly outputs. Although tween literature and patents would lead to technological improvements could be better discoverability

Load more