A call for sharing: adapting pharmaceutical research to new realities

From the dawn of time, the sharing of knowledge has been one of the main forces driving science and innovation. Yet in recent decades, a proprietary culture, which wrongly posits that all intellectual property must be restricted, has spread across the pharmaceutical industry and threatens to stall the engine that has given us so many valuable treatments. This paper argues that pharmaceutical companies, together with universities and government agencies, stand to gain much from reversing that trend and engaging in widespread collaboration early in the research process to expand foundational knowledge and create a shared infrastructure to tap it.