News by Subject Policy & Ethics

What's in a name? Doctors have found that the name of the drug you are prescribed significantly influences how the patient sees the treatment. Now in a significant shift, the world's major psychiatry organizations are proposing to completely change the terminology of the drugs used in mental disorders.

If a scientist has a good reputation among his colleagues, other scientists are more likely to cite his publications. According to a study, reputation is crucial for the impact of publications.

Policies put into place by major funding agencies like the National Institutes of Health, and to a lesser extent by scientific journals, appear to be meeting the goal of increasing the sharing of scientific resources among life science investigators.

Art, in other words, is an extension of the creator, according to research from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

An analysis of patented university inventions licensed to biotechnology firms has revealed early bottlenecks on the path to commercialization. To open these roadblocks, the researchers suggest that better communication of basic research results during the discovery stage could lead to faster commercialization down the road.

The less time patent examiners are given to review an application, the more likely they are to grant patent protection to inventions 'on the margin,' says a study co-authored by Melissa Wasserman, the Richard and Anne Stockton Faculty Scholar and Richard W. and Marie L. Corman Scholar at the University of Illinois College of Law.

The changing dynamic of health studies driven by 'big data' research projects will empower patients to become active participants who provide real-time information such as symptoms, side effects and clinical outcomes, according to researchers at Duke Medicine.

Academic technology transfer -- the process of moving research from the lab to the market -- provides intrinsic benefits to universities that go far beyond any potential revenues from licenses and royalties, according to authors from five universities across the country and the Association of University Technology Managers in a new article from the National Academy of Inventors published in the current issue of Technology and Innovation.

Website privacy policies are almost obligatory for many online services, but for anyone who reads these often unwieldy documents, trust in the provider is more commonly reduced than gained, according to US researchers.

When six university leaders took the stage at the 2013 Annual Conference of the National Academy of Inventors to discuss 'Would Thomas Edison Receive Tenure,' they began a national conversation on changing the academic culture to recognize faculty patents and commercialization activity toward tenure and promotion and their paper, 'Changing the academic culture: Valuing patents and commercialization toward tenure and career advancement,' appears in the current Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.