publish or patent?

The following points are from a paper published online in 2011 which relates peer-reviewed publication and patenting. The author works for a European pharma consultancy. He finds that for every three published patents in the medical field of vascular risk management, only one is also covered in peer-reviewed literature. Companies were observed to be far less likely to publish in scientific journals. The author notes that patents are considered far more important in the corporate world than in academia. He recommends that scientists and drug developers will find more information from studying patents than from scouring peer-reviewed journals.


• the motivations for filing a patent application and for submitting a manuscript for publication in a scientific journal differ substantially: while a paper is intended to offer data that allow new insights, a patent application is filed based on the expectation that the invention claimed therein could have practical applications within the next few years. This endows the “patent information universe” with an application-driven perspective instead of a science-oriented one


• a patent is filed with the perspective of securing exclusivity of use with respect to future commercial applications and to strategically preserve the inventors’ and assignees’ competitive edge

• the available data suggest that corporate inventors are less likely to publish their patented findings in scientific journals than nonprofit inventors. This was expected, since peer-review publishing is firmly rooted in academic culture while the standing of corporate scientists in the life sciences, or their companies, is not usually measured by such criteria. Patents are deemed far more important in this environment.


• analysis of patenting versus peer-review publishing in three major fields of vascular risk management shows that disregarding published patent documents as a source of novel information can severely limit researchers’ knowledge: 33 out of 48 documents had no direct equivalent in the peer review literature.


• the data that are available now allow the conclusion that international patent applications can offer valuable insights into new developments concerning vascular risk management which are not made available in academic peer-review publishing

Conclusion:

The patent literature, which is freely available online as full text, offers information to scientists and developers in the fields of vascular risk management that is not available from the peer reviewed literature.


In short, patenting is the preferred contemporary corporate way. Peer-review publishing, on the other hand, is rooted in academic culture where it is closely linked to peer recognition, funding and promotion. Patenting should be seen by biotech shareholders as a better investment of company time and money as it is of more value to big pharma interested in licensing or M &A.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3096506/