Exploitation of intellectual property systems for the manipulation of academic reputations

Patents are sought by academics and their institutions to protect their inventions. Academics also seek patents to enhance their individual profile and status for the purpose of job and promotion opportunities. Some institutions recognize the awarding of a patent to an individual academic as equivalent to or sometimes greater than publication in an international peer-reviewed journal. This article addresses the concerning development of patent inventorship credit being offered for sale by established education fraud companies alongside offers for authorship on academic papers and thesis writing. This article focuses on design registration in the United Kingdom (UK) but the issues identified are globally applicable. We characterize in detail the footprint of eight firms that are likely involved in the sale of thousands of UK registered designs to Indian academics for the purpose of academic reputation manipulation. Unlike patents, design registration applications are not examined for novelty or individual character (i.e. for whether the designs are actually new or innovative). Due to this limited examination process, these registrations generally issue quite quickly. We argue that exploitation of intellectual property systems should be considered one facet of the global enterprise of education fraud, alongside essay mills, diploma mills and research paper mills.

The authors are grateful to Kendra Albert for their pivotal feedback on this work. RAKR was supported in part by the National Institutes of Health Training Grant [T32GM008449] through Northwestern University's Biotechnology Training Program. RAKR gratefully acknowledges funding from the Dr. John N. Nicholson fellowship from Northwestern University; Moderna Inc., Identifying bias and improving reproducibility in RNA-seq computational pipelines. SSH gratefully acknowledges support from the Ryan Fellowship and the International Institute for Nanotechnology at Northwestern University. This manuscript has been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication in the International Journal for Educational Integrity.