News by Subject Policy & Ethics

A revolutionary power shift from internet giants such as Google to ordinary consumers is critically overdue, according to new research from a University of East Anglia online privacy expert.

Most new patents are combinations of existing ideas and pretty much always have been, even as the stream of fundamentally new core technologies has slowed, according to a new study led by SFI researchers.

Despite legal and ethical mandates for disclosure, results from most clinical trials of medical products are not reported promptly on a registry specifically created to make results of human studies publicly available, according to Duke Medicine researchers.

As branding and advertising creep into almost every facet of life, a new study from the University of Colorado Denver shows it's now making substantial inroads into popular music.

Bioengineers at the University of Texas at Dallas have created a novel gene-delivery system that shuttles a gene into a cell, but only for a temporary stay, providing a potential new gene-therapy strategy for treating disease. The approach offers distinct advantages over other types of gene therapies currently under investigation, said Richard Taplin Moore, a doctoral student in bioengineering and lead author of a study describing the new technique.

The Commons Lab at the Wilson Center is releasing two new reports today that address different challenges facing citizen science, one examining the policy implications of a range of successful citizen science projects in Europe and the other exploring potential legal issues surrounding intellectual property.

As major accounting companies increasingly outsource audit work to other firms, a new study from the University of Colorado Denver Business School says greater transparency is needed to help investors assess the quality of those audits.

Common wisdom and prior economic research suggest that an inventor filing a patent would want to keep the technical know-how secret as long as possible. But a new study of nearly 2 million patents in the United States shows that inventors are not as concerned with secrecy as previously thought. Researchers found that since 2000, most inventors when given the choice opted to disclose information about their patents before patent approval -- even small inventors -- and this disclosure correlates with more valuable patents.

A recently published study of more than 550 decisions and responses from 144 experienced entrepreneurs reveals that 'knowledge of explicit ethical or unethical behavior [by venture capitalists] profoundly shapes the entrepreneurs' willingness to partner.'

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.