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Asbasic research in biotechnology yields increasing commercial applications, scientists and their research sponsors have become more eager to protect the commercial value of research discoveries through intellectual property law. Some scientists fear that these commercial incentives will weaken or even undermine the norms that have traditionally governed scientific research. In this Article, Professor Eisenberg examines the interaction of proprietary rights in inventions with these traditional scientific norms. Trade secrecy, she argues, is an undesirable strategy for protection of basic research discoveries because it impedes dissemination of new knowledge to the scientific community. She finds that patent law is in many respects more congruent with scientific norms than trade secrecy because it is premised on disclosure rather than secrecy. Professor Eisenberg demonstrates, however, that the fit between the patent system and the norms and incentives of the scientific community is hardly perfect. Patent law may operate to delay the dissemination of knowledge to other researchers. Moreover, by granting rights to exclude others from using patented inventions for a term of years, the patent system threatens the interest of the scientific community in the free use and extension of new discoveries. Professor Eisenberg concludes that greater sensitivity to the impact of patent law doctrine on scientific norms will help to reconcile the norms and incentives of these two systems.

We are entering a new and exciting era of microbiological study and application. Recent advances in the now established disciplines of genomics, proteomics, and bioinformatics, together with extensive cooperation between academic and industrial concerns, have brought about an integration of basic and applied microbiology as never before. Microbial Physiology aims to reflect this development by publishing original research papers from all areas of microbiology and biotechnology. It also features written symposia on selected topics, timely reviews, and mini-reviews. Theoretical approaches and descriptions of novel, microbiologically relevant software are also considered. Contributions and ideas from large segments of the scientific community are welcome to make Microbial Physiology a viable, much needed, and up-and-coming forum for current basic and applied microbiological research.

In areas of cumulative research such as biotechnology, broad patents on fundamental research tools have the potential to create impediments to follow-on research and development. Impediments to R&D may also be created by possible thickets of upstream rights. Whether such impediments actually arise in any given case is of course an empirical question. From an empirical standpoint, the net impact of recent increases in upstream biotechnology rights is far from clear. It is fair to say, however, that one standard market solution to rights thickets - the reduction of transaction costs through collective institutions that pool and exchange rights - has not emerged. Rather, in the commercial arena, significant transaction costs and licensing fees have simply become part of the cost of doing business. Although these costs may have reduced profits, foreseeable sales revenues have been sufficiently high that the profit incentive has not been eliminated. In contrast, when follow-on research is conducted in the university context, or by non-profit institutions that target the developing world, foreseeable payoffs are either highly uncertain or are clearly small. In these contexts, large transaction and licensing costs may pose a more pressing problem. However, at least in the context of low-margin research that targets the developing world, there is reason to be optimistic that the standard solution of collective rights management will actually work. When the follow-on research in question is of demonstrably low commercial value, there is no reason for upstream rightsholders to fear that they are foregoing large downstream rents. Thus, even though conditions in the biotechnology sector may, as a general matter, work against collective action, low-margin research should be an exception. Non-profit institutions such as universities that are highly sensitive to reputational pressures should be the easiest players to enlist. Fortunately, in both agricultural and health-related biotechnology, non-profit institutions own a significant percentage of upstream patents.

This paper analyzes the patterns of health biotechnology publications in six Latin American countries from 2001 to 2015. The countries studied were Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba and Mexico. Before our study, there were no data available on HBT development in half of the Latin-American countries we studied, i.e., Argentina, Colombia and Chile. To include these countries in a scientometric analysis of HBT provides fuller coverage of HBT development in Latin America. The scientometric study used the Web of Science database to identify health biotechnology publications. The total amount of health biotechnology production in the world during the period studied was about 400,000 papers. A total of 1.2% of these papers, were authored by the six Latin American countries in this study. The results show a significant growth in health biotechnology publications in Latin America despite some of the countries having social and political instability, fluctuations in their gross domestic expenditure in research and development or a trade embargo that limits opportunities for scientific development. The growth in the field of some of the Latin American countries studied was larger than the growth of most industrialized nations. Still, the visibility of the Latin American research (measured in the number of citations) did not reach the world average, with the exception of Colombia. The main producers of health biotechnology papers in Latin America were universities, except in Cuba were governmental institutions were the most frequent producers. The countries studied were active in international research collaboration with Colombia being the most active (64% of papers co-authored internationally), whereas Brazil was the least active (35% of papers). Still, the domestic collaboration was even more prevalent, with Chile being the most active in such collaboration (85% of papers co-authored domestically) and Argentina the least active (49% of papers). We conclude that the Latin American countries studied are increasing their health biotechnology publishing. This strategy could contribute to the development of innovations that may solve local health problems in the region.

Copyright: 2018 Len-de la O et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: The scientometric analysis was based on data extracted from the Web of Science Core Collection ( -and-academic-research/research-discovery/web-of-science/). The Latin American countries GDP data are available in the World Bank Group Research and Development Expenditure data ( ), the OECD Gross domestic spending on R&D data ( -domestic-spending-on-r-d.htm), and Konema data ( -y-desarrollo/Gasto-en-IandD/Gasto-IandD-percent-del-PIB). The number of inhabitants in Latin American countries data is available in the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs data ( ). All other relevant data are available via Dryad (DOI: 10.5061/dryad.269k8).

Funding: This work has been supported by the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnologa (CONACyT) Mexico, under grant number: 367868. DILO. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Countries that started to promote biotechnology in the last century have a leading role in the field. The United States (U.S.) is the indisputable global leader in biotechnology. In 2006, the U.S. invested US$ 22 billion exclusively in biotechnology research and development (R&D) and the investment continued to rise and reached US$ 33.9 billion in 2015 [11,12]. In comparison, the second largest investor, Europe as a whole, invested in 2006 US$ 3.6 billion in biotechnology and by 2015 US$ 6.2 billion [11,12]. At the same time, the U.S. Congress was one of the first to introduce biotechnological policies and laws [13]. Other historical examples include the European Union (known as the European Community at the time) that allocated more than US$ 300 million to biotechnology-related programs in the early 1980s [14]. These programs constituted the first step to create the biotechnology industry in Europe. At the time the United Kingdom, Germany and France were the countries with the highest investments in the field outside of North America [15,16]. In 2015, the financing of the global biotechnology industry had reached US$ 180 billion and had almost doubled compared to the 2014 financing of US$ 102.57 billion [17]. This reflects the high expectations and financial attractiveness perceived of biotechnology in the business world and by governments worldwide.

To fill this gap we conducted a scientometric analysis of HBT publications in six Latin American countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba and Mexico. The questions we are addressing in this paper are as follows:

The scientometric analysis was based on data extracted from the Web of Science (WOS) Core Collection. It has more than 55 million records of peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings on science in the world [39] and it also has access to Scielo database (Scientific Electronic Library Online). This is a Brazilian database of open access journals in Latin America, Spain, Portugal, the Caribbean and South Africa [40]. Lastly, we used the tools and retrieving algorithms on international citation indices that WOS provides: the citations index; the rank of countries in a field; the science-field classification; the collaboration among countries in a specific field; and the document type classification [41].

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