Unfortunately, university administrators sometimes miss this distinction. Goodman stresses that Berkeley’s OTL was quite reasonable, but “when I look around the country, what worries me is that universities have gone a little overboard. People with every reagent that goes out of their lab shouldn’t suddenly be asking for... your firstborn child and maybe even your second or third-born child.” Like many researchers, Goodman has been frustrated by the proliferation of material transfer agreements (MTAs), legal documents designed to protect an inventor’s intellectual property rights to a reagent. In extreme cases, an MTA may grant the original inventor ownership of any subsequent discovery made with that reagent, no matter how indirect. In some cases, such as the Cre-Lox technology developed at DuPont (Wilmington, Delaware, USA), this arises because of the divergent interests of industry and academic science. Using a recombinase system from a bacteriophage, Cre-Lox allows inducible gene deletion in mice, a powerful technique that academic researchers were anxious to use. In an effort to protect its rights to the technology, though, DuPont attached an MTA to the technology that granted the company far-reaching ownership of downstream developments. Academic researchers considered the MTA too intrusive to sign, and the technique remained inaccessible. But industry hardly has a monopoly on making reagents—and even data—difficult to obtain. In a survey of geneticists, Campbell found that 47% had been denied data or reagents associated with published research at least once in the past three years, and 12% admitted denying another academician’s request for data in the same time period (JAMA, 2002, 287: 473–480). The time and effort required to distribute biological materials were most often cited as the reason for denying access, and the second most common reason was a desire to protect a junior colleague’s ability to publish subsequent work before turning reagents over to competitors. So what industry does for money, academics do for papers. And also, perhaps, for money (see “The academy’s bottom line”).

Whatever the motivation, the impact on science can be disturbing: 28% of Campbell’s survey respondents said they were unable to replicate published research because they were denied access to essential reagents or data.“The integrity of our system of science rests on two pillars... peer review and replication. If we couldn’t [replicate results], would we still believe in cold fusion?” asks Campbell. With the nudge from the editors of major journals (see “Editors led an