219 Rights and Responsibilities Regarding Intellectual Property sponsor a head s

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219 Rights and Responsibilities Regarding Intellectual Property sponsor a head start in using the results. Classified (confidential, secret, or top secret) research cannot be published of course. That is one reason why many universities will not accept any grant or contracts to do classified research on campus. (Another is that it would create on-campus research that would be closed to students who were not eligible for security clearances and thus curtail the open exchange of ideas that is a central value of universities.) The proprietary rights embodied in patents and copyrights work differently from crediting mechanisms that have no property implications. The patent arrangements that attend industrial sponsorship of university research are inde- pendent of criteria for fairly crediting authors and other contributors to a research article. Consider the following situation Failure to Credit the Source of Research Data Ramos is the head of a chemical company. As a part of a research and development effort, Ramos offers to provide funding to the chemical department of a major university for research on the removal of poisonous heavy metals (chromium, copper, lead nickel, zinc) from waste streams. In return, the university agrees to give Ramos's company the exclusive rights to any technology developed in the field of water treatment or waste stream management. As compensation, the university will also receive a royalty from the company from the profits resulting from the use of the technology At the university, a group of professors, led by Polinski, decides to form a company to exploit obtained except for water treatment and water waste management that Ramos's company will develop. Meanwhile, while the university is conducting this research, Ramos's company is conducting its own parallel research. Both teams obtain data and performance figures, and Ramos's company freely shares its results with the professors in Polinski's company Later, Depasquale, a professor of civil engineering at the same university, decides to conduct research and publish a paper on sewage treatment technology. He contacts the professors in the chemistry department, who furnish him with data from their tests, as well as with data from Ramos's company. Depasquale is unaware that some of the results come from Ramos's company Depasquale is successful in her research, and her article is published in a major journal. The data obtained by Ramos's company are displayed prominently in the paper, and make up a major portion of the article. The paper credits the members of the chemistry department, but nowhere mentions the contributions of Ramos's company, even though its funds supported both projects Depasquale later learns that Ramos 's company was the major contributor to the data in her paper Is it plagiarism for Depasquale to publish the data without crediting all of the sources? Why or why not? Is it Depasquale's obligation to give full credit to Ramos's company for its data? What, if any, action should Ramos take after discovering the article? What, if any, additional information would you want before deciding what to do, if you were in Ramos's position? Source: Adapted from NSPE Case 92-7 Under the agreement with Ramos's company, the university agreed to give the company exclusive use of any resulting technology developed for water and wastewater treatment. The company left the faculty members free to exploit applications of the technology other than the treatment of water and wastewater. Presumably, any patent on the technology would belong to the university or its faculty members, with Ramos's company having exclusive license to develop or apply the technology for water treatment.

Explanation / Answer

Plagiarism is commonly defined as the unacknowledged appropriation of words, graphic images, or ideas of other person. In this case, Depasquale acknowledged the university for providing the results. Though the original source of the results belongs to Ramos company, Depasquale is not obligated to acknowledge the Ramos company. Generally, those who conduct the research in the industry do not receive the publication credits as authors but their work is considered as employees property. According to the aggrement between Ramo's company and the university, University will provide the exclusive right to use the technology. We can consider their is no aggrement related to use of data for other reasearches. As the aggrement period was not completed, both the university and investing company has the rights on the data. Generally universities delays their publications and give the compnay an opportunity to use the results before making it public.

University must have informed Depasquale regarding the original source of information. The university took the wrong credits, so if Ramson wants to take the action, he can ask the university to inform his company before using the data (for other research) given by his company. Or even he can ask the university to do not use the results until the aggrement period is over.

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