Last month, Paul David, professor of Economics at Stanford University, Senior Fellow of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) and a member of the Advisory Panel delivered a keynote presentation at the International Seminar of the PROPICE in Paris.

Professor David expresses concern that the increased use of intellectual property rights (IPR) protections “has posed problems for open collaborative scientific research” and that the IPR regime has been used by businesses e.g. to “raise commercial rivals’ costs”, where empirical evidence shows has shown that business innovation is “is being inhibited by patent thickets”.

In describing the anti-commons issue, professor David also pointed out that research databases are likely sites for problems and emphasised the importance of protecting the future open access to critical data.

Also, high quality data would be very costly, where “…strengthening researchers’ incentives to create transparent, fully documented and dynamically annotated datasets to be used by others remains an insufficiently addressed problem”.

Read the whole presentation below: