Context is everything: making the case for more nuanced citation impact measures.

Access to more and more publication and citation data offers the potential for more powerful impact measures than traditional bibliometrics. Accounting for more of the context in the relationship between the citing and cited publications could provide more subtle and nuanced impact measurement. Ryan Whalen looks at the different ways that scientific content are related, and how these relationships could be explored further to improve measures of scientific impact

The Bayh–Dole Act & Public Rights in Federally Funded Inventions: Will The Agencies Ever Go Marching In?

For over thirty years, the Bayh–Dole Act has granted federal agencies the power to force the recipients of federal research funding to license the resulting inventions to third parties. Despite having this expansive power, no federal agency has ever seen fit to utilize it. This Note explores why Bayh–Dole march-in rights have never been used, and proposes reforms that would help ensure that, in the instances when they are most required, the public is able to access the inventions it bankrolled. There have been five documented march-in petitions since the Bayh–Dole Act was passed into law. Each petition was dismissed by the funding agency without progressing to the march-in proceeding stage. Even if one of these petitions had made it to the proceeding stage it is unlikely that a march-in would have occurred. The Bayh–Dole Act’s march-in rights are designed in such a manner that makes their effective use highly unlikely. Procedurally, they offer expansive protections for patent holders and few safeguards for those who petition for march-in. A few minor reforms to the system could help appropriately balance the march-in system’s design. Potential reforms include instituting an appeal process, mandating a duty to use “best efforts” to bring subject inventions to the point of practical application and report on those efforts, clarifying the meaning of Bayh–Dole’s “reasonable terms” requirement, and instituting a requirement that subject inventions be marketed in the United States at internationally competitive rates. In addition, a requirement that subject inventions be licensed via public auction rather than private negotiation would help ensure that those best suited to commercializing inventions have the chance to secure the rights to them

The Structure of Federal eGovernment: Using hyperlinks to analyze the .gov domain

This paper uses the hyperlink structure of federal web sites within the .gov domain to answer two research questions: to what degree does the online structure of the federal government mirror its offline hierarchy, and to what degree does the .gov web graph mirror the greater WWW graph. Findings of subgraph link analysis and Krackhardt’s graph theoretical dimensions of hierarchy analysis demonstrate clear hierarchy within the .gov domain, but also suggest great discrepancies in the linking patterns of different government departments. Structural analysis suggests that the .gov web graph is indeed a fractal leaf of the greater WWW graph

Complex Innovation and the Patent Office

As the universe of available information becomes larger and innovation becomes more complex, the task of examining patent applications becomes increasingly difficult. This Article argues that the United States Patent Office has insufficiently responded to changes in the information universe and to innovation norms. This leaves the Patent Office less able to adequately assess patent applications, and more likely to grant bad patents. After first demonstrating how innovation has been responsive to contemporary innovation norms for hundreds of years, this Article uses information and data science methods to empirically demonstrate how innovation has drastically changed in recent decades. After empirically demonstrating the changed innovation system and the inadequate response to these changes by the USPTO, this Article concludes with policy prescriptions aimed to help the Patent Office implement examination procedures adequate to assess 21st century innovation. These prescriptions include more granular crediting for the time spent by examiners assessing applications, an increased focus on teamwork at the Patent Office, improvements to the inter partes review process, and alterations to the analogous art doctrine

Legal Networks: The Promises and Challenges of Legal Network Analysis

Article published in the Michigan State Law Review

The Bayh–Dole Act & Public Rights in Federally Funded Inventions: Will The Agencies Ever Go Marching In?

For over thirty years, the Bayh–Dole Act has granted federal agencies the power to force the recipients of federal research funding to license the resulting inventions to third parties. Despite having this expansive power, no federal agency has ever seen fit to utilize it. This Note explores why Bayh–Dole march-in rights have never been used, and proposes reforms that would help ensure that, in the instances when they are most required, the public is able to access the inventions it bankrolled. There have been five documented march-in petitions since the Bayh–Dole Act was passed into law. Each petition was dismissed by the funding agency without progressing to the march-in proceeding stage. Even if one of these petitions had made it to the proceeding stage it is unlikely that a march-in would have occurred. The Bayh–Dole Act’s march-in rights are designed in such a manner that makes their effective use highly unlikely. Procedurally, they offer expansive protections for patent holders and few safeguards for those who petition for march-in. A few minor reforms to the system could help appropriately balance the march-in system’s design. Potential reforms include instituting an appeal process, mandating a duty to use “best efforts” to bring subject inventions to the point of practical application and report on those efforts, clarifying the meaning of Bayh–Dole’s “reasonable terms” requirement, and instituting a requirement that subject inventions be marketed in the United States at internationally competitive rates. In addition, a requirement that subject inventions be licensed via public auction rather than private negotiation would help ensure that those best suited to commercializing inventions have the chance to secure the rights to them

Specialists, Generalists, and Policy Advocacy by Charitable Nonprofit Organizations

Previous research finds modest levels of engagement in policy advocacy by charitable nonprofits, despite legal regulations permitting nonprofit advocacy and the significance of public policy to nonprofit constituencies. This paper examines nonprofit involvement in policy advocacy using survey data from Boston, Massachusetts. Nonprofit participation in policy advocacy is associated with professionalization, resource dependence, features of the institutional environment, and organizational characteristics such as size and mission. Drawing from population ecology theory, we examine an additional aspect of organizational mission: whether a nonprofit serves a specialized or general population. We find that nonprofits serving specialized populations are more likely to participate in policy advocacy than nonprofits serving the general population

A Network Theory of Patentability

Patent law is built upon a fundamental premise: only significant inventions receive patent protection while minor improvements remain in the public domain. This premise is indispensable for maintaining an optimal balance between incentivizing new innovation and providing public access to existing innovation. Despite its importance, the doctrine that performs this gatekeeping role—nonobviousness— has long remained indeterminate and vague. Judicial opinions have struggled to articulate both what makes an invention significant (or nonobvious) and how to measure nonobviousness in specific cases. These difficulties are due in large part to the existence of two clashing theoretical frameworks, cognitive and economic, that have vied for prominence in justifying nonobviousness. Neither framework, however, has generated doctrinal tests that can be easily and consistently applied. This Article draws on a novel approach—network theory—to answer both the conceptual question (what is a nonobvious invention?) and the measurement question (how do we determine nonobviousness in specific cases?). First, it shows that what is missing in current conceptual definitions of nonobviousness is an underlying theory of innovation. It then supplies this missing piece. Building upon insights from network science, we model innovation as a process of search and recombination of existing knowledge. Distant searches that combine disparate or weakly connected portions of social and information networks tend to produce high-impact, new ideas that open novel innovation trajectories. Distant searches also tend to be costly and risky. In contrast, local searches tend to result in incremental innovation that is more routine, less costly, and less risky. From a network theory perspective, then, the goal of nonobviousness should be to reward, and therefore to incentivize, those risky distant searches and recombinations that produce the most socially significant innovations. By emphasizing factors specific to the structure of innovation—namely, the risks and costs of the search and recombination process—a network approach complements and deepens current economic understandings of nonobviousness. Second, based on our network theory of innovation, we develop an empirical, algorithmic measure of patentability—what we term a patent’s “network nonobviousness score” (NNOS). We harness data from US patent records to calculate the distance between the technical knowledge areas recombined in any given invention (or patent), allowing us to assign each patent a specific NNOS. We propose a doctrinal framework that incorporates an invention’s NNOS to nonobviousness determinations both at the examination phase and during patent litigation. Our use of network science to develop a legal algorithm is a methodological innovation in law, with implications for broader debates about computational law. We illustrate how differences in algorithm design can lead to different nonobviousness outcomes, and discuss how to mitigate the negative impact of black box algorithms

Legal Networks: The Promises and Challenges of Legal Network Analysis

Article published in the Michigan State Law Review

Developing a Bike-Share Program for Salinas and CSUMB

Our goal for this semester in Sustainable City Year Program was to research and understand the intricacies of pre- and post bike-share implementations in both downtown and urban areas, as well as on college campuses so we could make recommendations to the city of Salinas and for California State University Monterey Bay (CSUMB). We also created two surveys, one for CSUMB and one for Salinas. These surveys allowed us to get a better understanding of what constituents and students know about bike-share programs as well as their interest in having one and their concerns they might have if one were to be implemented. Overall, we have two questions for our research: (1) could Salinas benefit from a bike-share program? And (2) would a bike-share program be beneficial for CSUMB’s expanding campus