Intellectual property rights and good research practice

Excerpt

Who owns the rights to health outcome-related items and instruments? There are various responses to this question, and varying interpretations of what is meant by intellectual property rights. Intellectual property lawyers would likely have a complicated and involved interpretation and it is our understanding that collections of items can be copyrighted as instruments, but the question is less clear for the individual items. Does this mean that any researcher can take any collection of items from one or more existing instruments and create a new instrument? Yes, we think so, but (and this is an important but) the new instrument cannot be labeled as any of the existing instrument(s) used to derive the new form. Recently, a group of researchers examined the factor structure and psychometric qualities of the standardized version of the Asthma Quality of Life Questionnaire [1] and found that several of the items may not be relevant for the Greek translation of the instrument [2]. While the psychometric results are useful for understanding the measurement qualities of the AQLQ, the authors implied that they developed a new version of the instrument, the AQLQ-18. This resulted in an interesting exchange of perspectives related to intellectual property and copyright issues related to health outcome measures [3, 4]. …