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 that the licensing of academic patents has on journal citations to academic publications covering the same scientific research. We analyze data on invention disclosures, patents, and licenses from the University of California, a leading U.S. 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. Based on a "difference–in–differences" analysis, we find that within our sample of patented academic discoveries, citations to licensed patent–linked publications are higher in the three years after the license, although this difference is not statistically significant. But when we disaggregate our sample into (a) patented discoveries that are likely to be used as "research tools" by other researchers (based on the presence of material transfer agreements (MTAs) that cover them) and (b) patented discoveries not covered by MTAs, we find that citations to publications linked to the licensed patents in the latter subset to be not only higher for publications linked to licensed patents than for unlicensed patents, but that this difference is statistically significant. In contrast, licensing of patented discoveries that are also research tools is associated with a reduction in citations to papers linked to these research advances, raising the possibility that licensing may restrict the flow of inputs to "follow–on" scientific research.

The ability to edit genes with CRISPR has, in a few short years, been transformative to genetics, generating follow-on science such as drought-resistant crops and mosquitos that cannot carry malaria, and is widely expected to win a Nobel prize. The rush of scientists to embrace CRISPR in its early days provides an important and data-rich environment in which to study how tacit information is codified and transferred for others to build upon. In particular, the introduction of CRISPR allows us to explore whether embedding the associated knowledge into an easy-to-distribute tool (a plasmid) and making it available through a biological resource center (Addgene) solves the "tacit information" problem and the physical localization that accompanies it. We show that codification into a scientific tool does solve the problem of access; scientists of equivalent caliber experiment with CRISPR in equal measure regardless of where in the U.S. they are. However, scientists across different geographies have unequal success in converting that experimentation into published science, suggesting that some tacit information problems persist. The remaining tacit information seems to be driven by expertise, with geographies specialized in mammalian CRISPR helping to create publishable science on mammals and geographies specialized in bacterial CRISPR helping to create publishable science on bacteria. Collectively, our case study of the earliest days of CRISPR speaks to the tacit information challenges that are, and are not, solved by distributing embedded materials.

Recent work has revealed rapid improvement in the algorithms that underpin modern computing. For many computations, these algorithmic innovations have been more important than those in computer hardware (including Moore's Law, which is known to have substantially improved firm productivity). In this article, we analyze who built the "Algorithmic Commons". We find that the United States has been the largest contributor of these public goods, with universities and large private labs (e.g. IBM) playing the biggest role. More broadly, we find a historical pattern of contributions consistent with world geopolitics, where the United States took algorithmic leadership in the post-war period, but that this has faded in recent decades as Europe recovered and then Asia grew.