Abstract
BackgroundIn recent years numerous studies have undertaken to measure the impact of patents, material transfer agreements, data-withholding and commercialization pressures on biomedical researchers. Of particular concern is the theory that such pressures may have negative effects on academic and other upstream researchers. In response to these concerns, commentators in some research communities have called for an increased level of access to, and sharing of, data and research materials. We have been studying how data and materials are shared in the community of researchers who use the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) as a model organism for biological research. Specifically, we conducted a textual analysis of academic articles referencing C. elegans, reviewed C. elegans repository request lists, scanned patents that reference C. elegans and conducted a broad survey of C. elegans researchers. Of particular importance in our research was the role of the C. elegans Gene Knockout Consortium in the facilitation of sharing in this community.ResultsOur research suggests that a culture of sharing exists within the C. elegans research community. Furthermore, our research provides insight into how this sharing operates and the role of the culture that underpins it.ConclusionsThe greater scientific community is likely to benefit from understanding the factors that motivate C. elegans researchers to share. In this sense, our research is a 'response' to calls for a greater amount of sharing in other research communities, such as the mouse community, specifically, the call for increased investment and support of centralized resource sharing infrastructure, grant-based funding of data-sharing, clarity of third party recommendations regarding sharing, third party insistence of post-publication data sharing, a decrease in patenting and restrictive material transfer agreements, and increased attribution and reward.
Highlights
In recent years numerous studies have undertaken to measure the impact of patents, material transfer agreements, data-withholding and commercialization pressures on biomedical researchers
As part of our work with the Intellectual Property and Policy Research Group (IPPRG) at the University of British Columbia, we have studied how data and materials are shared in the community of researchers who use the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) as a model organism for biological research
Our research suggests that a culture of sharing exists within the C. elegans research community
Summary
In recent years numerous studies have undertaken to measure the impact of patents, material transfer agreements, data-withholding and commercialization pressures on biomedical researchers. In recent years numerous studies have undertaken to measure the impact of patents, material transfer agreements (MTAs), data-withholding and commercialization pressures on biological researchers [1,2]. As part of our work with the Intellectual Property and Policy Research Group (IPPRG) at the University of British Columbia, we have studied how data and materials are shared in the community of researchers who use the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) as a model organism for biological research. Of particular importance in our research was the role of the C. elegans Gene Knockout Consortium (GKC) in the facilitation of sharing in this community. The GKC is a collaboration between three C. elegans labs, located in Canada, Japan, and the United States, whose mandate is to produce null alleles of all known genes in the C. elegans genome - creating knockout strains - and to share those strains with the public pre-publication [6]
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