Should industry be allowed to compete with academics for research funding?
Branwen Hide
Tuesday, 14 April 2009 14:32 UTC
Last week the John Armitt, Chair of the EPSRC suggested that industry should be allowed to compete with academics for research funding from the seven UK research councils at the research councils ‘future visions’ meeting.
For more information see the bottom of the article in last weeks THE .
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Replies
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That’d be a no.
Partnerships between academic researchers and industry work well as they are, and the RCs have a number of schemes to support this. This change would not only see the UK rightly chastised for public subsidies to industry, industry would then just cut its R&D spend to the amount it managed to reap from public science (probably to put into marketing or acquisitions). Good for industry balance sheets, bad for public science.
Where on earth did this idea come from (beyond John Armitt)?
I’d be very interested to see its full provenance. -
I had a quick look, but the only place I could find this comment was the THE article. I was a little scared by the fact Ian Diamond, did not dismiss the idea but said “he would consult the chief executives on the matter”.
If industry did receive public money for their research would they also have to comply with the open access mandate – ‘publicly funded research must be made publicly available’?
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> would they also have to comply with the open access mandate
Heh, good point. That’d probably kill it. Though they’d get a couple of years at least to exploit the IP of any research. In fact I think the BBSRC settled on four years didn’t they — I have to check that but I have two kids attacking me at the moment. Nonetheless I don’t think they’d be overly keen to give stuff up even after four years.
There’s also the issue of what it means to give money directly to a multinational company — international collaborations are often treated quite differently by funders — both here and in the US it can be tricky to get funds if you might be seen to be supporting research conducted outside that country. Perhaps that isn’t so different to how things are now though, given that academics collaborate with industry already? (I’m confusing myself now.)
Just got the mailshot for the RIN meeting on mandates at the end of May btw. Looks interesting.
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It’s three years (so at least I kind of bracketed the target). But that is a guide figure only. Quotes below are from the FAQs at the end of the BBSRC’s Data Sharing Policy document:
My research seeks supports from both the public and private sectors. How do I deal with the sharing of proprietary data?
BBSRC recognises that there may be circumstances where restrictions on data sharing will be required. Any Intellectual Property issues or plans for commercialisation should be highlighted in the case for support of the grant application. While BBSRC recognises that commercialisation may require periods of exclusive use of data, it should not preclude or unduly delay or prevent data sharing.What is the timescale for sharing data?
The timescale for release for the data may differ for several reasons, however it is expected that timely release would generally be no later than the release through publication of the main findings and should be in-line with established best practice in the field. Where best practice does not exist, release within three years of generation of the dataset is suggested as a guide.Does data sharing pertain only to published data?
No, data sharing plans should encompass all data from funded research that can be shared regardless of whether the data have been used in a publication. -
It’s interesting to consider the many different models we see – for basic research, the US and the UK have tended to fund academics, the EU has tended to prefer “networks” that include both academia and industry. I’d be curious how those of you in Europe see this. (In the US and the UK defense/defence funding has always included joint work with academia and industry, another data point). I have been known to opine at times that the basic relationship between government, industry and academia (where traditionally govt has funded academia to the benefit of industry) may need to be revisited as the faster change of modern science is putting stress on the traditional models of transition – personally, I’d be moving the other direction (expecting industry to pick up more of its share – over the past couple of decades industry has in many cases outsourced research to govt funded academia) but that does bring up issues of conflicts of interest and such — no easy answer, I guess…
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with regard to the BBSRC time scale for data sharing. In some ways 3years seems a bit arbitrary, though it does tie into a grant cycle. If one of the reasons for the interest in ‘sharing data’, is to stimulate new discoveries and new types of research isn’t it better to get it out there right away?
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It would of course be for the greater good to have it out there asap, but the issue (and remember that BBSRC will always remind you that ultimately they are community-governed by strategy panel members reflecting the views of scientists whose existence depends on them justifying their own existence and who are therefore justifiably selfish because without microaccreditation and all that they have to get publications to continue to exist) is that if data go straight into the public domain (a la ‘open lab books’) then anyone can exploit it in parallel to those who invested significantly in the work to generate it. That just won’t wash — if you don’t get chance to get papers from your data after taking sufficient time to analyse it, then under RAE or REF or any normal measure of academic productivity (as I say, given the absence of microaccreditation or anything like that and the sooner we have that the better) it seems that you cost a lot to run, but make little of value, whereas those who grab your data and publish on it before you seem to be the exact opposite.
The time that should be allowed for exclusivity with one’s own data is open to question though. At the data policy meeting I went to (one of many that they ran) I argued for two years as enough time to wring all the value out of a data set, some argued four, which seemed a bit much to me but they know much more than I.
And I perhaps overplayed the maximum limit a little — the policy actually requires release on publication, which could be a lot sooner than three years — that’s just the longest you can leave it. (Quote: “it is expected that timely release would generally be no later than the release through publication of the main findings and should be in-line with established best practice in the field”).
In my ideal world, people would have a short time to run with data (and by analogy, to develop software without having to open-source it) to get a head start as chef’s privilege, then it would go to the public domain, but with all subsequent use passing value back to the generator. But we need mechanisms, and we need a kind of Performing Rights Society (they that collect royalties for musicians) to enforce it all, and of course we need the metrics applied to researchers to be updated appropriately.
But then there is this reductio ad absurdum thing about GenBank/EMBLBank/DDBJ: If I blast a sequence against my DB of choice, should every submitter get a femto-credit? (Bear in mind a miss is as valuable as a hit in an ID search, strictly speaking.) There are lines to be drawn, lots of conversations to be had. All I know is that the projects I work on to get people reporting more data with rich accompanying metadata, nicely tagged with CV, according to reporting guidelines, will remain an uphill struggle (though we’ve seen that tools help a lot) until people are properly accredited for all subsequent use of their data, so that those who judge their ‘worth’ can see it, and so that their careers benefit. Till then, embargo periods are a necessary thing.
Will I ever write a short email…
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Interestingly, early in the Web deployment days people kept talking about the importance of people preserving their own data for a long time, and why the Web wouldn’t work because of that (why would any company put their prices on the Web, that is their competitive information) – but the pressures of their competitors putting things into Web sites forced them to as well. I believe the new wave of data publishing on the Web (search on Semantic Web and/or Linked Data), and esp the increasing by in by the US and UK govts, is going to make a new push for open data — so I think in the next decade we’re going to see a switch from how long to save date to “how much data can you share how soon”
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