Impact of academic patenting on scientific publication quality at the project level

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the relationship between patenting and publishing at the project level. It uses Japan’s Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research database. Japan’s Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research is the major funding source for academic researchers in Japan. This database provides information on inputs (budget, period, project members, etc.) and outputs (publications and patents) from each funded research project. The main finding is that patenting has a curvilinear correlation with higher impact, i.e. the number of higher impact publications from funded research projects increases with the number of patents only to a certain amount, and after a peak, it decreases. Our finding implies that if a finding is a relatively significant and marketable breakthrough, researchers who have the possibility of patenting in mind become less likely to share their results openly. Meanwhile, previous studies implicitly assumed that researchers have to make a choice between basic or applied research projects, or for a particular research project choose to make it more applied or basic. Another finding of this study is that the assumption applies to projects. Our findings imply that a heavy emphasis on patenting may reduce the amount of high-quality publishing of scientific research.

KEYWORDS:

• Academic publishing
• patenting
• project management
• research grant
• Japan

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 20H00074. The authors would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their time and efforts to review this paper. All remaining errors are our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Full information on Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research is available at https://www.jsps.go.jp/english/e-grants/.

2 The Grants-in-Aid Scientific Research Database (the KAKENHI database) can be found at https://kaken.nii.ac.jp/en/.

3 A patent family is a set of patent applications filed in various patent authorities to protect a single invention in various countries. Accordingly, all the patents derived from a particular invention is counted as one patent.

4 Based on qualitative research including 68 interviews with researchers at two U.S. universities, Owen-Smith and Powell (2001) found that academic researchers decide to patent because of their beliefs about the positive personal and professional outcomes of establishing intellectual property protection. However, perceptions of the benefits of patent protection varied between academic fields. Whereas scientists perceived the proprietary benefits of patents as commodities, physical scientists perceived the relational benefits of patents as markers for exchange.

5 The patent applications decline after 2012. That is attributed to that our database was constructed in 2013 and projects that finished after 2012 reported only a part of outputs.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Byeongwoo Kang

Byeongwoo Kang is an associate professor at the Institute of Innovation Research and the Graduate School of Business Administration, Hitotsubashi University. Prior to his current position, he was a research fellow at the Institute of Developing Economies – Japan External Trade Organization. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo in 2014 and his B.S. from Tohoku University in 2006.