The scientific information provided through patents and its limited use in scientific research at universities

Abstract

This study aimed to evaluate the importance of protecting the knowledge generated by the university through patents, and assess the use of information available in patent database as a source of scientific and technological information. To this end, the doctoral theses defended in 2010 to 2012 year at the Basic and Applied Immunology FMRP/USP Post Graduation Program, were evaluated considering patent applications by the authors involved, as well as by other national/international unrelated research groups. The data showed that only 8% of the thesis (two) had its results added to a patent filing. Moreover, no other student was found to held a patent resulting in other researches, and also, a few supervisors are researchers who held authored/co-authored of patent filling. When we assessed if theses’ results and applications had been patented by other groups not related to the thesis group, it was noted that there was no record of patent filling in 46% of theses, and in this group, it was included researches with strong potential for patentability, but the authors didn’t applied for a patent deposit. The remaining 54%, representing 14 theses, had part or the whole knowledge disclosed in patents documents, five of these were specific about the topic and the results of the thesis, presuming that there was a likely duplicity in the development of the research. We can conclude that the study was once repeated since no searching for information in patents databases were properly performed as reference source in the development phase of their research projects. The results of this research indicates that the use of patents database, as a source of technological information by the universities is an urgent requirement, since represent a rich scientific information bank that should be aggregated with the information available in papers to conduct innovative research.