Material transfer agreements (MTAs) are contracts that allow one party to perform research using the materials of another party. These agreements provide a mechanism to protect the interests of the owners of discoveries and inventions, while promoting data and material sharing in the research community. Although these are admirable goals in principle, MTAs have a bad reputation with some researchers and institutions for being overly complex and, in fact, hindering research. Nonetheless, MTAs are [...]

In October, an NIH team, led by Ian Hutchins, published their exciting new work, "Predicting Translational Progress in Biomedical Research." The team built a machine learning system that detects whether a paper and its underlying research are likely to be clinically successful, i.e., lead to commercial products for human use. Specifically, the team created an AI-based, big-data model that evaluates research papers based on multiple metrics to determine if that particular study or innovation [...]

In a move that evidences an emerging pattern, Rothschild Patent Imaging LLC, a non-practicing entity ("NPE"), has filed a complaint asserting patent infringement against the open source software organization, the GNOME Foundation. The GNOME Foundation is the non-profit organization that coordinates the development and operation of the popular open source desktop environment with which it shares a name. The GNOME desktop environment supports many free and open source software applications. Rothschild alleges in the [...]