Does University Licensing Facilitate or Restrict the Flow of Knowledge and Research Inputs Among Scientists?

As university involvement in technology transfer and entrepreneurship has increased, concerns over the patenting and licensing of scientific discoveries have grown. This paper examines the effect of licensing on the citation of academic publications associated with patents covering university scientific research. We analyze data on invention disclosures, patents, and licenses from the University of California, a leading US academic patenter and licensor, between 1997 and 2007. We also develop a novel “inventor– based ” maximum–likelihood matching technique to automate and generalize Murray’s (2002) patent– paper “pairs ” methodology. We use this methodology to identify the scientific publications associated with University of California patents and licenses. We find that, in general, licenses are associated with an increase in journal citations to related scientific publications. The timing of this effect supports earlier research that suggests that academic licenses may act as positive signals of research potential in the licensed technological area (Drivas et al. 2014). In contrast, we find the opposite effect of licensing on citations to related scientific publications when the underlying discovery is a research input (which we identify through the use of material transfer agreements (MTAs)). In these cases, the related scientific publications experience a significant decline i