Make nanotechnology research open-source

Despite being an extremely active area for academic research, publishing and patent applications, nanotechnology development is being hindered by current intellectual property (IP) law. Patenting of basic science and entire classes of nanotechnologies with overly broad claims is leading to higher transaction costs, slower and sub-optimal technical development and the removal of obvious knowledge from the public domain. This effectively hamstrings the current primal nanotechnology development, in contrast to the history of other emerging scientific and technical fields. The growing dominance of the open-source paradigm from software development provides a viable means of guiding the accelerated development of a technology. The application of the open-source paradigm from software development can both accelerate nanotechnology innovation and improve the social return from public investment in nanotechnology research. This can be accomplished by requiring: 1) free open access to all publicly-funded nanotechnology research, 2) all future publicly-funded innovation in the nanotechnology sector be placed in the public domain, and 3) a moratorium on patenting fundamental nanotechnologies (e.g. size dependent properties). Following an open-source approach, everyone in the nanotechnology field would be working in a community with the same access and rights to knowledge and contributing back to the community with new knowledge. In this way, the full potential of nanotechnology can be reached to drive the next industrial revolution, where matter can be manipulated as easily as software.