Intellectual property rights and the evolution of scientific journals as knowledge platforms

The objective of this paper is to evaluate the role that formal intellectual property rights (IPR) play in shaping the downstream demand for knowledge that is initially disclosed through scientific publication in fields where research is generated and utilized across different institutional settings (i.e., academia versus industry). For scientific discoveries with potential commercial applicability, researchers (or their funders) may also seek to establish formal intellectual property protection (e.g., patents); choosing to establish a “patent–paper pair” allows researchers to influence follow-on access to knowledge disclosed in a given scientific journal. This paper evaluates the relationship between scientific journal publication and patenting in research communities with significant public and private authorship by examining the incidence and impact of patent–paper pairs in two journals founded in the late 1990s/early 2000s, Nature Biotechnology and Nature Materials. Using a differences-in-differences framework that exploits the delay between publication and patent grant, we document a range of findings about the impact of patent grant across time and across research populations. First, we find that the negative impact of patent grant is concentrated in the first few years after a journal's founding and eventually becomes positive. Second, patent grant positively impacts follow-on citations from private authors more than from public authors. Finally, we observe an assortative matching pattern where intellectual property grant increases forward citations from authors sharing the same institutional affiliation (e.g., public authors citing public papers) more than research across institutional lines (e.g., public authors citing private papers).