In January 2016, the Canadian Ministry of Innovation, Science and Economic Development (the “Ministry”) commissioned this study to gain insight into technological innovation in Canada through the lens of the United States (“U.S.”) patent system. Comprehensive patent data of the sort...

The impact factor of an academic journal for any year is the number of times the average article published in that journal in the previous two years are cited in that year. From 1994-2005, the average impact factor of journals listed by the ISI has been increasing by an average of 2.6 percent...

Funding agencies and policy makers in science tout the importance of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research -- bring together experts from multiple domains and good things happen. But what are these good things and can they be measured? Scholarly networks are a good model system for...

In this paper, we show how the Eigenfactor(R) score, originally designed for ranking scholarly journals, can be adapted to rank the scholarly output of authors, institutions, and countries based on authorlevel citation data. Using the methods described herein, we provide Eigenfactor rankings for...

In their seminal 1972 article, "Property Rules, Liability Rules, and Inalienability: One View of the Cathedral," Guido Calabresi and A. Douglas Melamed proposed an analytic framework for comparing entitlements protected by property rules and liability rules. Their article has become one of the...

Humans tend to demonstrate strong preferences for images they consider aesthetically pleasing. Aesthetic preferences often manifest themselves in the law, and are especially relevant to forms of intellectual property protection for visual designs, works, marks, and aspects of celebrity...

Planet earth is host to a dazzling variety of living organisms. This diversity of life, or – biodiversity, is vital to the survival and prosperity of humanity, supplying such vital amenities as food, clothing, shelter, natural biochemicals useful in medicine, industry, and agriculture, and...

Patent protection for genetic enhancements would tend to spur genetic innovation, but would tend to limit access to those genetic enhancements through discriminatory mechanisms such as price and favoritism. The patent system would likely ensure high rates of genetic enhancement innovation,...

On October 26, 2012, the University of Akron School of Law’s Center for Intellectual Property and Technology hosted its Sixth Annual IP Scholars Forum. In attendance were thirteen legal scholars with expertise and an interest in IP and public health who met to discuss problems and potential...

Courts are rarely asked to judge beauty. Such a subjective practice would normally be anathema to the ideal of objective legal standards. However, one area of federal law has a long tradition of explicitly requiring courts to make aesthetic decisions: the law of design. New designs may be...