Open for business: can open science partnerships mitigate barriers to academia-industry collaboration and science-based innovation?

Abstract

Effective academia-industry collaboration can be hindered by barriers that create obstacles to collaboration and hamper the use of science in industry. Open Science Partnerships (OSPs) have been ascribed with the potential to reduce such barriers. They are a relatively novel form of precompetitive public-private research partnerships that require participants to share all research outputs from the partnership in the public domain and preclude them from taking out Intellectual Property (IP) on any of these outputs. We explore the mechanisms by which OSPs seek to mitigate barriers to academia-industry engagement and to private firms’ access to and further investments in research outputs. Through an inductive, qualitative study of four OSPs within the biomedical field, we identify three mechanisms–a predefined open legal framework, open knowledge co-creation practices, and open sharing of research outputs–and argue that these mechanisms may address long-standing barriers to effective public-private collaboration on basic research.