The n-Category Café

Scott Carter:

To amplify on Walt’s question, what happens when the research can and does lead to commercial applications? It is my understanding that the University retains patent rights and ordinarily shares these with the faculty. Maybe, this is part of the opt-out option.

I don’t know much about this stuff: $n$-categories will eventually have enormous commercial applications, but I plan to be dead by then.

Still, it seems you’re mixing up publication and patenting. Harvard’s now saying that anything you plan to publish, you should first put on their open-access library. But people don’t usually publish things they plan to patent! After all, according to the fount of all wisdom:

Prior art (also known as state of the art, which also has other meanings) in most systems of patent law constitutes all information that has been made available to the public in any form before a given date that might be relevant to a patent’s claims of originality. If an invention has been described in prior art, a patent on that invention is not valid.

This sets up a conflict between the scholarly desire to publish and the entrepreneurial desire to patent. Universities worry about this all the time. But, I don’t see how Harvard’s open-access policy touches on this. It only affects papers that the faculty want to publish.

Again, I’m pretty naive about this stuff…

In my own subfield anyway, “typical academic researchers” don’t necessarily behave that way in practice (although what’s typical is slowly changing). I think many (if not most) mathematicians who don’t use the arxiv don’t use it mostly out of inertia, not because it’s prohibited by journals. Strong institutional encouragement to disseminate papers freely may be largely symbolic, but it does have the potential to make a real difference to how often that’s done.

In the humanities, most researchers I know do not make their research freely available electronically. When I suggest doing it, they often act surprised. They think it’s an interesting idea… but they’re scared to actually try it.

For example, they’re scared about possible plagiarism. They don’t have a tradition of widely spreading ‘preprints’ before publication clinches ones claim on a piece of work. So, I tell them that having a time-stamped version of your paper on a publicly available website is the best defense against plagiarism. For this, of course, it’s not enough to put your paper on your own perrsonal website. But for lots of disciplines there’s nothing like the arXiv yet.

So, the example of Harvard could have a big effect in the humanities. “If they can do it, so can we.”