NIH panel wants to open the research toolkit

WASHINGTON - The National Institutes of Health should take an aggressive stance to promote the free dissemination of research tools, including sometimes exercising its authority to retain rights to inventions that are licensed to companies, an NIH working group has recommended.

According to a report by the Working Group on Research Tools, there is broad agreement among scientists that research tools should be shared. But the report notes that defining what constitutes a research tool can be very subjective. For example, a new agent or technology may be a research tool for an academic scientist while it is a potential product for a bioscience company that produces it...