Let me add my particular concerns here-- this is a rapidly developing situation which is turning basic-research-factories (universities) into a more-- well, "corporate" model, I suppose.
Complete with non-disclosure and need-to-know being front and center, which kills ad hoc collaboration and open sharing of preliminary research and hypotheses.
What has made universities such great incubators of basic (as opposed to applied) research (though, of course this is the jetstream that applied research and patentable discoveries rides upon) is that openness.
If you're concerned about getting scooped, you're more likely to keep your mouth shut-- ESPECIALLY among people who are likely competitors.
The problem is that science is not (and really-- has never been) mostly conducted in a vacuum that way. Your in-field competitors are the ones most likely to be able to elevate your nascent idea into something truly great.
But this unseemly scrabbling for intellectual property is just-- killing that.
Publish first, yes, that has been a thing for a while, and everyone in science has seen firsthand how some things get ignored in favor of stuff which is largely "captain obvious" material, but eminently publication-worthy. Or how researchers fail to seek expert input that they probably could really use, but won't get because they are small fish, and giving a whiff of what you're up to to one of the BIG fish (well-funded labs that have armies of post-docs running a well-oiled, 24-7 science machine like the Borg)... you're going to get scooped before your two undergraduates have a chance to spend the next year on it.
The patent thing is accelerating a lot of trends that pushing publications so hard had already been doing.
Ultimately, we should probably all be quite concerned about what will happen when nobody is much interested in doing long-shot basic research anymore. And that day is very definitely coming.
It's already the case in pharma research. It's all about the intellectual property, and cost-profit ratios now. Marginal discoveries that are really transformations of extant intellectual property are the name of the game.
There are some areas of basic research that are going begging because they are too long a shot for corporate pharma to fund, and now universities and granting agencies don't want those projects either. So who is going to fund research that yields new classes of antibiotics, hmm?
