Intellectual Property and Computational Science

Abstract

This chapter outlines some of the principal ways United States Intel- lectual Property Law affects the sharing of digital scholarly objects, particularly for those who wish to practice reproducible computational science or Open Science. The sharing of the research manuscript, and the data and code that are associated with the manuscript, can be subject to copyright and software is also potentially subject to patenting. Both of these aspects of Intellectual Property must be confronted by researchers for each of the these digital scholarly objects: the research article; the data; and the code. Recommendations are made to maximize the downstream reuse utility of each of these objects. Finally, this chapter proposes new structures to manage Intellectual Property to accelerate scientific discovery.