Contributed by Organizations or Campuses; Articles, Papers, and Reports; Patents; and Cyberinfrastructure

This article presents a survey of responses to patent thickets. The first group involves efforts to either keep questionable patents from ever issuing or removing them from patent space after they have issued — in particular, the “Peer–to–Patent” project, also known as “Community Patent Review.” Proposed by Professor Beth Noveck (2006) and subsequently incorporated into a pilot project by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), Peer–to–Patent will use distributed online communities to assist in the review of patents for questions of novelty and obviousness and by enabling a virtual community of practice in a field to suggest prior art to the patent examiner. Its success will depend on the ability to leverage developments in cyberinfrastructure in the areas of Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) and information retrieval. This article also suggests extending Peer–to–Patent into the realm of patent reexamination and post–grant opposition, which are mechanisms that can remove invalid patents once they have been issued.

The development of a new generation of cyberinfrastructure promises to increase and facilitate globally distributed scientific collaboration as well as access to scientific research via computer networks. But the potential for such access and collaboration is subject to concerns regarding the intellectual property rights that will be associated with networked data and with networked collaborative activity. Intellectual property regimes are generally problematic in the practice of science, because scientific research typically assumes practices of openness that may be hampered or obstructed by intellectual property rights. These difficulties are likely to be exacerbated in the context of networked collaboration, where the development and use of intellectual resources will likely be distributed among many researchers in a variety of physical locations, often spanning national boundaries. Such issues may be addressed by a combination of public and private approaches, including amendment of U.S.