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Freeing the Good Stuff From University Labs
netbuzz writes "University research labs are not supposed to be like Vegas: What happens in them is not supposed to stay there. A nonprofit from the Kauffman Innovation Network launching yesterday at DEMO 07 aims to free the fruits of academic research that would otherwise sit trapped on university shelves. Bonus: the site translates academic-speak into English.
Yeah, it may be free of "academic-speak" but it's free of pretty much everything else as well. Thanks for posting this to Slashdot!
I imagine they were off reading this wildly uninteresting and uninformative story, like I was. Thirty seconds of my life I'll never get back :(
"As the intrepid kobold companion continues his journey, he begins to wonder... if priests raises dead, why anybody die?
Please, don't add your personal overtones.
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
Some dude wants to see university research. Then they write an article about it and post it on Slashdot?.
Well I want to see boobs, lots of them. Can I have my Slashdot story now please?
I think it's a good move trying to get these things out of the dark corner they've ended up stashed in. I wish I could be a little more descriptive than that, but the article really doesn't give much to go on. I'm normally one to encourage others to read the whole article before posting, but in this case, the synopsis given on slashdot almost contains more actual information than the article itself...
Perhaps the expectation is that we'll go research it and then report back if there's actually something interesting going on somewhere. Somehow. Maybe even related in some way.
But expectations are sometimes disappointed.
I am the one true god. However, as an atheist, I don't believe in myself. I guess I have a self-esteem problem.
At first I thought this article was going to be pointers on "freeing the good stuff" chemistry-wise from the lab stores.
Darn.
Well, the idea is fine: create a site where academics can post plain-English summaries of their research, and where companies can go looking for people doing research in a particular field. Thus it helps to link-up those who have well-defined problems to others who are working on well-defined solutions. This allows companies to either find research they can start funding (because they want the results), or, in the case of more mature research, to find research patents that they want to license.
So far, so good. It's a good idea precisely because it is simple. The problem, however, is that there is little reason, at present, for either academics or companies to use this site. The site will only become useful once it has built up a significant community of users. Only then will it be useful to either side.
Academics are already very busy, and finding time to post summaries is going to be difficult. They will only do it if there is a good chance that some company will take notice. Likewise companies are not going to waste time looking through a small database of random research results.
So it's a catch-22 where no one is going to use the thing until it's useful; hence it will never become useful. Perhaps with their startup money they will pay people to start inputting findings, at least until the network reaches a critical mass. But until the site has a big enough of a following, you're going to have a hard time gaining visibility. This is same problem alot of "networking" sites have: it's hard to build up a big community. What they really need is to figure out some way to make the site useful, even while it is small in size.
I'm a lawyer who (among other things) advises startups who want to license discoveries from universities. There is already a thriving market in such research, thanks in large part to the Bayh-Dole act, which allows universities to exploit inventions funded by the US government. The gov't gets a non-exclusive right to practice the invention (or have it practiced for the government) and there are a few other relatively minor restrictions. Because of this, Universities have been mining their research for years. Especially in the biochem and biotech industries, the vegas-like attitude does not exist. Quite the opposite -- researchers typically now conduct their research with an eye toward its commercial practicability. Before Bayh-Dole, this rarely happened.
No private corporation should ever be able to patent anything developed with my tax money. Why is THAT allowed to continue? I'm tired of paying for companies' research for them. In fact I'd say that this state of affairs is why more public companies don't bother to do major research. They know they can get the same stuff done for free (or for much cheaper anyway) by a University someplace, using our tax dollars.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The Bayh-Dole Act ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh-Dole_Act ) confers univeristies the IP rights to their discoveries.
P226
Thank you for putting it here; and keep up the shitty work!
Wait a minute, "Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful".
How long until they start a similar project?
WTF?
They're too busy freeing the virtual mice from the university labs.
Most research institutions I know are in it for the money, and work at the direction of other agencies. They aren't going to publicly disclose results. In fact the university I work at has a special affiliated corporation which is used to develop, patent and market the results of research done here. There's no way anything of great value would be published in an open forum. For all those who are going to yell and scream about public institutions, etc, etc the bottom line is that the institutions would not be able to continue to exist solely on tuition and other funding. A huge part of the operational budget comes from outside funding sources to fund research grants.
[humor on the lines of phdcomics]
yes, please release us grad students from the shackles of these tyrannic advisors!
[/humor]
University research labs are not supposed to be like Vegas: What happens in them is not supposed to stay there.
That simile works like Vista on a 386.
"Nearly all research professors are delighted to talk the ear off anyone who shows an interest in their research. So, if you want to know what they are doing, just ask!"
That's one half of the equation. Having an audiance that understands what's being said is the other half. Just look at the low responses science stories get around here.
In an area tangential to something I do, an early researcher got a marginal patent on an algorithm (as applied to that particular field). That patent was used to prevent others from following the work and more-or-less shut down innovation in this area for a decade.
I don't know if there are any socially redeeming uses for patents, but I know that there aren't in academia.
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
This is funny, some guy trying to profit by bringing academic comp sci resreach to his netwrok and selling access. Too bad academic already publish most of thier stuff as oss!!! plt scheme, CMU common lisp, openmosix, GNU you name it, its already there, so where is the value add? Translating academic speak? That sounds liek marketing...academic speak english in USA!
One of the measures by which a researcher's effectiveness is measured is by how often his or her papers are cited in other papers. And the more exposure their papers have, the more chances for citation.
I'm very glad to hear of this, actually. Right now I use CiteSeer for finding online papers. It's pretty good, but I would like to see it expanded and improved on.
On top of that, there's saying the right things so as to attract and not offend investors^h^h^h^h^h^hfunding: "We'd better not publish xxx because TwinkleCorp, our benefactors, would not like it", "We'd better not hire/promote Joe Sixpaxi because he is outpoken against TwinkleCorp".
Instead of being free thinking research establishments where ideas are formed and shared, universities are now becoming self-censoring commercial enterprises. This really changes the nature of what a university is.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
...and read about original research hot off the press there. www.pubmed.org. many articles are now available free (some as soon as they appear, some with a specified lag, i.e. 6 months or so). That's if you really care about "freeing" the research from the dark corners. I find, on the contrary, that most people are much more satisfied by the simplified analysis offered in lay journals (Scientific American, Discover, etc.) or news outlets/blogs, than the primary literature. Those who do care about R&D, like the pharmas and the universities themselves, already know how to pursue "freeing" the research from the academic arena. This new approach (who knows what it is, the article isn't very informative) isn't going to help anything.
True, however government is largely to blame for that situation, but not in the way you'd think. Government cut a lot of funding, leaving universities shorthanded, and having to find alternative funding. That was corporations. And as someone else mentioned below. All the research in the world is useless if no one is willing to iron out the rough spots and put in the work to make it useful to the majority. That leaves two choices, government or corporations. I'll leave it as a historical exercise as to who is better at that.
The diseases you get in Vegas don't stay in Vegas. They come back with you.
My experience trying to use technology from universities is pretty bleak. First of all there is an arrogant attitude permeating academia that I simply won't tolerate. Real things are learned in the real world. School in the best case scenario just smoothes out the learning curve. Very few students or staff have any tangible experience with the real world and it causes problems when trying to accomplish anything. Personally I no longer waste my time with school children.
Correct me if I'm worng but I think the Universities are locking down on what they say simply because the Patent rights can be so valuable.
During my university career, my fellow students and I freed quite a bit of "good stuff" from our labs... ethanol, useful glassware, etc.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
After looking at that iBridge site for a little while, I can see how it would be useful, but I doubt it ever will be.
The problem is the buzzword creep which effects everything in research from grant writing to paper titles. There are too many people (PR departments?) out there who want their reserach to be meta-nano-bio-info stuff for national security. So searching for actual ideas in any popular area brings up a lot of research only very tenuously connected to the subject you're looking for.
Of course, there is not a bright line, for instance, Bell Labs back in the day did a lot of research without view to practicability. Bell Labs is famed for being the source of an awful lot of really awesome stuff, too.
Bell Labs was an artifact of an attempt to scam government regulation.
AT&T was allowed, as part of its monopoly grant by the Fed, to set telephone rates so they made about 6% on all the money they spent on building the system. That included research on how to do telephony better.
So they set up Bell Labs to spend money on research with some tenuous connection to telephony. For every dollar they spent they could effectively bill phone users $1.06 and add six cents to the bottom line.
So Bell Labs did all sorts of research - not just applied research, but basic research - though always with some plausible telephony connection, of course.
And the hysterical thing about it is that, as a scam, it was a total failure. It turns out that basic research comes up with LOTS of useful stuff - just not necessarily something you could anticipate before you start and explain to the PHBs to justify the expense. From year one (until a recent point far post-disvestiture when some Boston Business School types finally looted it by scrapping the research projects for short-term profitability) Bell Labs research made more for the company (in process savings, licensing fees, and the like) than it cost them.
But financially it was still a win of cosmic proportions - both for its owners and for humanity.
Basic research is REALLY good stuff economically. It's just that you can't say what the benefits will be until you actually make the discoveries...
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Before Bayh-Dole, there was a system where everything was patented with the patent assigned to the government and it sat on a shelf, as no one benefited by marketing the patent to potential customers. The *right* thing to do from a public point of view would have been that all inventions funded in whole or in part by US taxpayer dollars should have been put into the public domain as they had already been paid for. Instead, patent lawyers and universities got a free hand-out and the US public gets asked to pay twice (or more) for the same stuff. Conflict-of-interest and corruption plain and simple. Now universities keep professors from talking about their research until patents are filed and academic research is further skewed by pressure short term commercialization possibilities. The problem of money in academia has to do more with the pyramid scheme nature of PhD eduction (see below).
For more on how Bayh-Dole has ruined academia, see the article "The Kept University" for example:
http://www.newamerica.net/publications/articles/20 00/the_kept_university
http://www.colorado.edu/Sociology/gimenez/papers/k eptu.html
"One of the most basic tenets of science is that we share information in an open way," says Steven Rosenberg, of the National Cancer Institute, who is among the country's leading cancer researchers. "As biotech and pharmaceutical companies have become more involved in funding research, there's been a shift toward confidentiality that is severely inhibiting the interchange of information." A few years ago Rosenberg confronted this problem firsthand when he tried to obtain information on safe-dosage levels for a reagent he sought to use in a clinical trial involving an experimental cancer treatment. The company asked Rosenberg to sign a confidentiality agreement, and when he refused, they withheld the information. Rosenberg has become so alarmed about secrecy that he now urges all scientists and research institutions to reject confidentiality restrictions on principle. Few have heeded his call. A 1997 survey of 2,167 university scientists, which appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association, revealed that nearly one in five had delayed publication for more than six months to protect proprietary information -- and this was the number that admitted to delay. "The ethics of business and the ethics of science do not mix well," Rosenberg says. "This is the real dark side of science."
For more on the deeper issue of the collapse of the PhD pyramid scheme, as the exponential growth of academia has ended, see Dr. David Goodstein's testimony to Congress (he is the Vice Provost of CalTech):
http://web.archive.org/web/20060509161315/http://w ww.house.gov/science/goodstein_04-01.htm
"In the course of a career, a professor in a research university turns out, on the average, about 15 Ph.D.'s. Many of these would like, themselves, to become in turn professors in research universities and turn out 15 more Ph.D.'s. After all, these were the gems that were selected at each stage of the mining and sorting operation. Becoming a professor seems to many of them the natural culmination of their successful educations. That is obviously one of the principal engines of the exponential growth that lasted for a hundred years in America. Those students are bitterly disappointed when they find out the jobs they want aren't there, and their disappointment seeps down through the ranks, turning younger students away from science. There are some who have blamed these problems on a shortage of Federal funds for research. Many have argued that we should double our national investment in science, and that may well be true. But I do not thin
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Now, I reveal the best kept secret in academia, which is ..........
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
[Frankly, many profs don't do any research anyway...]
It is, in fact, very hard to get academics to conclude anything beyond "this approach shows great promise, and should be investigated further". [ Please give me more money. ]
Of course, a journalist can't use such a non-conclusion to anything, so the few academics who like to use stronger statements (or like to be in the media) are used constantly. So those are the academics the laymen are going to see.
> It's also something that could easily fall under a university's PR budget
The PR budget actually being used on the researchers? What a wonderful place you live.
Where I live, the university budget is used to hire non-academics to find out new uncredited duties for the researchers to do, which they can then compensate for by spending even less time on the students (meaning they will get less students next year, and move closer to being fired), less time on research (meaning they will have a harder time getting new grants, and move closer to being fired), or less time on their family (which is no problem, as any spouse worth keeping at this point will already have filled for a divorce, and moved away with the kids).