Ron A. Bouchard of the University of Alberta, and Trudo Lemmens of the University of Toronto, write in a Commentary in this month’s Nature Biotechnology (Nat. Biotechnol. 26, 31-36; 2008) that the allocation of risks and benefits of publicly sponsored biomedical research is becoming increasingly skewed toward for-profit entities and against the public interest. A legitimate solution to this imbalance would be to levy compulsory government royalty fees on commercial products made possible by public efforts.

The authors argue that “public–private partnerships can be particularly valuable in circumstances involving large transaction costs associated with novel biomedical inventions aimed at the global public good. That said, a combination of self-interest and anxiety in the face of globalization has led to wide swings of the pendulum of S&T policy and scholarship in recent years, with argument for expansive IPR rights on the one hand and their abolition in favor of a completely open source model on the other. Neither position is likely to be balanced or workable over the long term, as both may skew too far to private or public interests.” A compulsory government royalty on technologies commercialized using public money, they argue in their Commentary, is a necessary ‘third way’ to protect the interests of for-profit entities and those of the public.