Corporate Science, Innovation, and Firm Value

Many firms actively disclose research findings in scientific peer-reviewed journals. The literature highlights several potential benefits of such scientific boundary-spanning activities, including privileged access to academic information networks. However, scientific disclosure may lead to unintended knowledge spillovers. It remains unclear whether active engagement in science leads to higher returns. This paper investigates the impact of scientific activities on the firm’s market value, using accounting data for US firms and matched patent and scientific publication data. We find evidence for the positive impact of scientific publications on a firm’s market value beyond the effects of R&D, patent stocks and patent quality and also document heterogeneity with respect to this impact between different industrial sectors.

Corporate Science and Voluntary Disclosure

Markus Simeth

The dissertation investigates the phenomenon of firms that make voluntary contributions to the stock of scientific knowledge. Such a firm behaviour appears counterintuitive from a traditional viewpoint, since no direct financial returns can be expected while the disclosure of research outcomes may lead to knowledge spillovers to competing firms. This raises the questions why firms engage in those boundary-spanning activities, how scientific disclosure strategies are implemented, and to what extent scientific disclosure strategies affect the firm performance. The dissertation provides empirical evidence on these questions using representative firm-level data and econometric analysis techniques. The first chapter of the dissertation reviews the relevant literature, underlines the relevance of doing research on this topic by providing descriptive evidence on the amounts of scientific contributions by firms, and includes some novel insights from interviews which I conducted at several large R&D performing firms. I discuss the potential benefits, costs and organizational challenges of scientific disclosure strategies and position scientific publications as an expression of openness in the light of alternative openness definitions prevalent in innovation research. The second chapter focuses on the question why firms publish in scientific journals using a cost-benefit framework. In particular, I analyse whether scientific contributions of firms are used as an instrument to get access to academic knowledge networks. Moreover, I explore environmental conditions by considering the effectiveness of appropriation instruments and the spillover levels in a sector that may impact the firms’ decision-making process. The analysis relies on data from the French Innovation survey and provides evidence for the predictions that firms show reciprocal behaviour in exchange of obtaining valuable academic knowledge. However, the propensity of firms to publish is rather sensitive to the spillover threats. The third chapter examines how are firms able to publish by testing the requirements and origins of scientific contributions by firms. I explicitly consider the heterogeneity of scientific outputs and provide a complementary view on the requirements for the creation of inventive outcomes. The requirements considered can be classified according to the research orientation and the demographic composition of the R&D labs. The analysis revealed that scientific disclosure strategies require specific resource allocations and capabilities, which are in part not necessary for the generation of inventive outcomes. The findings support the view that disclosure strategies can be costly and are not only a by-product of the “usual” R&D activities. The fourth chapter addresses the performance effects of scientific activities of firms. More specifically, I examine whether scientific publications stocks provide valuable information to the financial markets, potentially leading to different valuations. I consider the heterogeneity of scientific and inventive outcomes and found evidence for a positive impact of scientific contributions on the firm’s Tobin’s Q beyond the effects of R&D stocks, patent stocks and patent quality.

EPFL2013

Three essays on access to knowledge

Patrick Gaulé

The first chapter of this thesis, coauthored with Annamaria Conti, seeks to add an economic contribution to the current debate on using university licensing contracts to improve access to medicines in developing countries. We build a simple model in which we have a university licensing out an academic invention to a profit-maximizing pharmaceutical company. We compare three different types of licensing contracts that the university might use to enhance access to pharmaceuticals in the South: (1) an exclusive license limited to the North; (2) an exclusive license worldwide with a price cap in the South; and (3) an exclusive license worldwide with a price cap in the South and a clause specifying that the licensee would lose its exclusivity in the South if it does not supply the Southern market. We show that in a simple model with asymmetric information on production costs the latter type of contract dominates the two others. In the second chapter, coauthored with Nicolas Maystre, we reexamine the widely held belief that free availability of scientific articles increases the number of citations they receive. Since open access is relatively more attractive to authors of higher quality papers, regressing citations on open access and other controls yields upward-biased estimates. Using an instrumental variable approach, we find no significant effect of open access. Instead, self-selection of higher quality articles into open access explains at least part of the observed open access citation advantage. The third chapter uses an evidence-based approach to assess the difficulties faced by developing country scientists in accessing the scientific literature. I compare backward citations patterns of Swiss and Indian scientists in a database of 43'150 scientific papers published by scientists from either country in 2007. Controlling for fields and quality with citing journal fixed effects, I find that Indian scientists (1) have shorter references lists (2) are more likely to cite articles from open access journals and (3) are less likely to cite articles from expensive journals. The magnitude of the effects is small which can be explained by informal file sharing practices among scientists.

EPFL2009

Open access models of publications: a strategy for improving 3R information retrieval?

Sylvie Vullioud-Marcacci

Accessing 3R information for fundamental research is difficult for many reasons: the titles, abstracts, and author keywords of scientific articles do not contain the terms 3R, Reduce, Refine, Replace, alternatives or replacement. Mesh terms in Pubmed or thesaurus terms in Embase are rare and are not systematically attributed to scientific articles using animal experimentation or substitution methods. Reporting of animal conditions, animal and cell strains used for fundamental research are often incomplete in the Material and Methods section because authors have omitted them, but certainly also because publishers demand concision. The Material and Methods section is not indexed by bibliographic databases now used in life sciences, Pubmed, Embase, Scopus, or WOS (Web of Science). If Google scholar indexes full texts including the Material and Methods section, access to articles depends on whether the journal has been licensed by the researcher’s institution. The Gold Open Access model for journals specialized in animal experimentation or substitution methods is rare. Moreover, Green Open Access to 3R information is poorly developed: websites of journals specialized in animal experimentation or substitution methods do not even specify embargo periods preventing free diffusion of articles, and if, they are not included in the Sherpa, a publisher copyright policies & self-archiving information database. The archiving of full-text articles using animal experimentation into institutional Open Archives is not systematic yet, even for one of the largest free-full text archive of biomedical literature at the US, PMC (Pubmed Central). LAMDHI (Link Animal Models to Human Disease) is a free Web-based tool developed for providing biomedical researchers with a resource to compare animal models and locate them for their research. But corresponding full-text access to articles on animal models still depends on institutional academic licenses. Over the last five years, SYRCLE (Systematic Review Centre for Laboratory animal Experimentation) has developed educational activities focused on training of Dutch researchers to carry out systematic 3R reviews. SYRCLE also developed special filters that can help systematically search of 3R information in Pubmed or Embase. In Switzerland, researchers were sensitized to adopt strategies for finding relevant 3R information in 2012 and 2013 at the request of RESAL (Réseau des animaleries lémaniques) and LTK (Institut für LabortTierKunde). The ECVAM (European Center for Validation of Alternatives Methods) edited a complete, user-friendly, and free access guide to help untrained database users find 3R information in 2011. The guidelines ARRIVE (Animal Research Reporting of In Vivo Experiments) and GSPC (Gold Standard Publication Checklist) for accurate reporting of animal experimentation are also now available for researchers. These examples of different initiatives for better finding and reporting of animal experimentation and substitution methods are a good start. But 3R information circuits should be changed to really enhance 3R accessibility in the near future. It could be a Swiss case study of the spreading (and controversial) movement of Open Access models to scientific information. The Consortium of Swiss Academic Libraries could start negotiating for national licenses to some or all journal titles specialized in animal experimentation or substitutions methods for the best price for Swiss universities. A shorter embargo diffusion time for 3R articles should be negotiated with publishers. The embargo diffusion could be systematically indicated on publisher journal websites and on the Sherpa database for the development of Green Open Access to 3R information. Universities could adopt the practice of archiving all 3R, animal experimentation, and substitution methods articles in their Open Archives bibliographic databases. The switch from a classical publication model to a Gold Open Access model could be discussed with journals focusing on animal experimentation and/or substitution methods. As a result, a new kind of financial resource for publication should be created with the help of universities, libraries and the SNF (Swiss National Foundation). The reporting of animal experimentation conditions according to the recommended standards ARRIVE or GSPC should be accessible freely on Open Access platforms, ie Frontiers, Open Archives such as Infoscience at Ecole Polytechnique de Lausanne, or publishers’ open-access websites, as it is the already the case for Plos journals. Finally, Swiss 3R institutions could think about the financing and/or participation to the ontology development of the new German semantic search engine Go3R. A multidisciplinary team including veterinary and life sciences researchers as well as librarians could be created to evaluate the feasibility of the above options. RESAL, LTK, FNS, SAMS (Swiss Academy Medical Science), SGV (Swiss Laboratory Animal Science Association), Commission des Bibliothèques médicales, 3R Foundation should work together to obtain common 3R resources and tools at the Swiss National level for universities and veterinary offices, and to adopt common 3R information practices for the improvement of 3R information accessibility, experimental results and life science reproducibility. [1

2013