 Communism is used sometimes in quotation marks, yet elsewhere scientific products are described without them as "communized".Merton states the "communism of the scientific ethos" is flatly incompatible with ""the definition of technology as “private property” in a capitalistic economy"", noting the claimed right of an inventor to withhold information from the public in the case of the U.S. v. American Bell Telephone Co.

A corollary to the need for common ownership of scientific knowledge is the imperative for "full and open" communication (which he saw in J. D. Bernal's writings ), as opposed to secrecy (which he saw espoused in the work of Henry Cavendish, ""selfish and anti-social"").The two aspects of Merton's universalism are expressed in the statements that "objectivity precludes particularism" and "free access to scientific pursuits is a functional imperative".