When Copyright Law and Science Collide: Empowering Digitally Integrated Research Methods on a Global Scale

Much scholarly attention has focused on possible impediments to both science and innovation arising from extensions of patent protection to research tools and to other upstream knowledge assets in ways that threaten to undermine the cooperative norms of basic scientific research.1 Until recently, however, far less attention has been paid to the growing capacity of global copyright law and related rights to impede access to, and use of, the cumulative scientific literature and data that digitally integrated scientific research methods massively ingest.2 In this Article, we contend that this latter phenomenon poses a more immediate and pervasive threat to basic scientific research methods today than the still controversial claims about thickets of rights and anticommons effects attributed to excesses of the patent system in recent years.3 A. Potentially Boundless Scientific Opportunities in the Digital Environment Information technology is transforming fields as diverse as molecular biology, especially genomics and proteomics,4 and conservation ecology,5 while spawning new fields, such as metagenomics6 and metabolomics.7 The combination of massive storage capacity, powerful data manipulation techniques, and graphical capabilities has revolutionized both how basic research is conducted and how the resulting knowledge is preserved and disseminated in nearly all fields of science.8 These methodologies have also helped to generate networked communities of users and collaborators, often working in dynamic knowledge hubs,9 whose interactive communications steer computational applications in potentially more fruitful directions10 and fill open repositories with new data and information.11 In this promising new research environment, scientists increasingly rely on automated knowledge discovery tools to mine and recombine vast amounts of data and literature that are flowing at rates that exceed the capacity of a single investigator to comprehend and manage.12 Exploitation of these new opportunities, in turn, requires integration of information and data scattered over a broad range of articles and databases that may or may not be available online for extensive computational research.13 For example, the use of networked computational techniques for linking global collections of articles and data to generate relevant research results, makes it possible to build field-specific knowledge repositories that capture reams of relevant scientific data and technical information and to apply general data-mining tools in the chosen environment.14 Users receive value when such tools can also be readily applied to the scientific literature. The digitization of research inputs and outputs has thus engendered opportunities for the enhanced speed of dissemination of publicly funded scientific data, for the development of high performing search engines that diminish the search time for publications, and for automated cross-linking and text-mining based on standardized metadata. The goal of this digital infrastructure should be to maximize these opportunities for public research institutes and universities in both developed and developing countries, while maintaining the classical functions of certification and diffusion of research results of the predigital print markets.