The academy’s bottom line.

In 1993, Columbia University’s incoming president, George Rupp, touched off a minor firestorm by publicly discussing his plans to expand science departments that were “revenue sources,” while cutting back the loss leaders in some humanities fields. Though Rupp’s comments were unusually blunt, most university administrators in the US were reaching similar conclusions. Since then, academic institutions have increasingly adopted the organization and rhetoric of corporations, and a focus on research funding and patent royalties has inexorably changed academic culture.

Many universities have now “come to view their stuff through an inappropriate lens of the for-profit activity of the OTL,” says Infinity Pharmaceuticals’ Steven Holtzman. “We’ve seen instances where the academy may have a resource ... and yet it’s withheld because it’s not viewed as profitable enough by the academy. Something’s gone wrong there. I think there’s been a distortion of the mission of the university.”

This unintended consequence of the Bayh-Dole Act seems to operate primarily at the level of university administrators. Other factors have driven change within the scientific community. “Science today is very, very different from science 30 years ago,” says Harvard’s Eric Campbell. “Science today is big science,” often driven by intense competition between large collaborative efforts. According to Campbell’s research, it is this competitive atmosphere, rather than pressure to generate profits, which has driven many researchers to withhold reagents from colleagues.

Editors led an unarmed charge.

The crusade for greater access to data and reagents was led primarily by the editors of peer-reviewed journals, some of whom adopted data release policies more than a decade ago. Though each journal has been free to set its own policy, an informal survey conducted for this article suggests considerable convergence.

Science magazine, for example, stipulates that “any reasonable request for materials and methods necessary to verify the conclusions of the experiments reported must be honored,” and large data sets must be deposited in a publicly accessible database. Nature requires authors “to make materials and methods used freely available to academic researchers for their own use,” with a similar stipulation regarding data access. At least a dozen other leading journals make substantially similar statements in their instructions to authors.

While agreeing that such policies have been important in shaping the debate about reagent access, most observers argue that journals are in a poor position to enforce rules. “In each tier, those journals compete with each other for the best work. There’s too much of a conflict there to ask them to really enforce [data sharing rules],” says Renovis’s Corey Goodman, adding that “the people who give you the money ought to be setting the rules.”

As the people with the money finally begin to take action (see main text), the rules already made by journals provide a surprisingly uniform set of community standards as a starting point.

Choosing an MTA to CYA.

One apparently straightforward solution to the problem of intrusive material transfer agreements is to create “universal” MTAs designed to cover ordinary reagent transfers. Is it really necessary to sign a legal agreement before lending a colleague a plasmid, though?

In a word, yes. Besides concerns about intellectual property ownership, heightened fears of lawsuits and recent developments in world events have led attorneys to propose some harrowing scenarios. What if a technician in another laboratory, using one of your reagents, suffers a life-threatening allergic reaction? What if your reagent is used as part of a biological weapon? If you lend something to a corporate laboratory, and it does not work as expected, can you be sued for the company’s resulting losses?

Experts also argue that there is no way to know which of a lab’s products will have commercial potential and which will not, so some clause protecting intellectual property is essential, even for seemingly trivial transfers. “I call it playing the IP craps table ... sometimes it really pays off. The problem is knowing what’s going to be the next Gatorade,” says Harvard’s Eric Campbell, referring to the University of Florida’s phenomenally successful sports rehydration drink.

To address these concerns, the NIH has created a universal biological MTA (UBMTA), which it expects all of its funded researchers to use when transferring reagents. HHMI has taken the concept a step further, with a “short form” MTA for transfers between academic laboratories, and a “long form,” with more detailed stipulations about intellectual property ownership, for transfers between academic and corporate laboratories.