Oldham, P. D. | Search bioRxiv

bioRxiv2020

Biodiversity Research and Innovation in Antarctica and the Southern Ocean

This article examines biodiversity research and innovation in Antarctica and the Southern Ocean based on a review of 150,401 scientific articles and 29,690 patent families for Antarctic species. The paper exploits the growing availability of open access databases, such as the Lens and Microsoft Academic Graph, along with taxonomic data from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) to explore the scientific and patent literature for the Antarctic at scale. The paper identifies the main contours of scientific research in Antarctica before exploring commercially oriented biodiversity research and development in the scientific literature and patent publications. The paper argues that biodiversity is not a free good and must be paid for. Ways forward in debates on commercial research and development in Antarctica can be found through increasing attention to the valuation of ecosystem services, new approaches to natural capital accounting and payment for ecosystem services that would bring the Antarctic, and the Antarctic Treaty System, into the wider fold of work on the economics of biodiversity. Economics based approaches can be criticised for reducing biodiversity to monetary exchange values at the expense of recognition of the wider values of biodiversity and its services. However, approaches grounded in the economics of biodiversity provide a transparent framework for approaching commercial activity in the Antarctic and introducing requirements for investments in the conservation of Antarctic biodiversity by those who seek to profit from it.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2018

Synthetic Biology: Mapping the Patent Landscape

This article presents the global patent landscape for synthetic biology as a new and emerging area of science and technology. The aim of the article is to provide an overview of the emergence of synthetic biology in the patent system and to contribute to future research by providing a high quality tagged core dataset with 7,424 first filings and 71,887 family members. This dataset is intended to assist with evidence based exploration of synthetic biology in the patent system and with advancing methods for the analysis of new and emerging areas of science and technology.\n\nThe starting point for the research is recognition that traditional methods of patent landscape analysis based on key word searches face limitations when addressing new and emerging areas of science and technology. Synthetic biology can be broadly described as involving the design, synthesis and assembly of biological parts, circuits, pathways, cells and genomes. As such synthetic biology can be understood as emerging from a combination of overlaps and convergences between existing fields and disciplines, such as biotechnology, genetic engineering, protein engineering and systems biology. More precisely, synthetic biology can be understood as the synthetic phase of molecular biology and genetic engineering. This presents the problem that key word strategies may radically overestimate activity because they involve terms that are widely used in underlying fields that are contributing to synthetic biology.\n\nIn response to this problem we combined anthropology, scientometrics and data science to map authors from scientific publications on synthetic biology into the international patent system. We mapped 10,816 authors into the international patent system and identified 2,450 authors of articles on synthetic biology who are also inventors in the period to December 2017. By combining this data with citation information and a baseline keyword strategy we are able to describe the global patent landscape for synthetic biology and the wider patent universe in which synthetic biology is situated.\n\nThis article describes the main features of the global landscape and provides the tagged dataset as a contribution to evidence based debate on intellectual property and synthetic biology and methodological development. We anticipate that the data will prove useful in informing international policy debates on synthetic biology under the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity.

synthetic biology↗