Test methods and IP: do we need more transparency from the administrators?

摘要

Many readers may be unaware that many toxicity test methods for industrial chemicals are not free, and users have to pay to use them. The reason they aren’t free is they contain elements that are protected by intellectual property (IP) rights. It wasn’t always like this. Go back a couple of decades and you would have struggled to find any IP at all within the canon of standard methods.