Formalizing the Informal Microbial Commons: Using Liability Rules to Promote the Exchange of Materials

The opportunities to accelerate scientific discovery and resulting applications are made increasingly possible by technological breakthroughs and pioneering methods to process and integrate vast amounts of data, information, and raw materials. Microbial research, which is outgrowing its “small science” institutional structures, needs to build upon these opportunities in an attempt to develop a global microbial research commons to promote access to databases, literature, and materials through an open, digitally distributed network. However, the increasingly blurred line between basic and applied research confers potential economic value even upon research inputs that are far upstream. As a result, the research community must increasingly come to terms with commoditizing pressures within developed economies. These pressures restrict the conduct of public-sector research through strong intellectual property rights and related contractual restrictions on access to and use of materials, publications, and data. At the same time, restrictive policies in developing countries under the Convention on Biodiversity complicate research uses of microbial materials held in public repositories ex situ, and make it increasingly difficult to access the vast in situ materials these countries control.

These trends have led to a proliferation of diverse licensing strategies and techniques, which collectively have elevated the transaction costs and other barriers for even relatively simple cooperative research projects. There is, therefore, a need to focus on the obstacles to upstream, non-commercial research and the solutions to them. An essential, early step is development of a set of design principles that address the economic, legal, and institutional dimensions of the transformation of the existing research infrastructure into what could become a globally distributed and digitally integrated research commons. The goal of this redesigned “soft” infrastructure would be to better manage publicly funded research resources, without compromising downstream commercial applications and fruitful partnerships between the public and private sectors, or between developed and developing countries.

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