Am I allowed to perform an open science study with use of commercial products?

Question

Can an independent open science study use commercial products without obtaining permission of the product owner/manufacturer?

For example, performing an open scientific study which analyses the relationship between obesity and fast food eating, independent comparisons of shampoo (to verify the company claims), or testing health effects on mice/rats by giving them commercial pharmaceutical/chemical substances then publishing the results publicly while adhering to the basic principles of open study.

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Comments

Voting to close. Arbitrarily adding "open" to a question that would fit on Academia.SE, does not qualify it for this site.

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This question appears to be asking about **independent** studies, and as such I agree with @Michael comment above. A better way of rephrasing the question might be to ask whether it is possible to conduct a _reproducible_ study following open science principles of making data and code freely available, if the study utilises commercial products.

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Modified to be more 'open science' oriented, however initially I didn't want to overuse this word.

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By independent I mean private/self-owned studies.

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Answer 1

The scenario you mention is actually the easier route for open science. If you had obtained permission and received some type of proprietary restricted materials or information with which to conduct your study then you would almost certainly not be allowed to release those. If you are only using materials and information that are publicly available then there is nothing preventing you from following open science principles in that study.

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