Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette

U.S. Policy on Intellectual Property in R&D: Emerging Political and Moral Issues

In the 1960s, as science in the United States entered a time of expansion, one principal concern of policymakers was the amount of scientific and technical information (STI) being produced and disseminated via print and electronic communications systems. There was fear that overwhelmed researchers would suffer from “intellectual indigestion” (Weisner 1965, 154). No one proposed reduced consumption, however; most government actions instead focused on short term solutions of organization, storage, and resource-sharing. As a result, the United States still lacks any coordinated national policymaking process for scientific communication, major policy issues of ownership and control of intellectual property in science have remained unresolved, and the dilemmas have magnified, as scientific institutions and agencies merge data-processing, research, archival, library, and personal communication systems into ever larger cooperative electronic networks.