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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.
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?
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
WTF?
The iBridge Network aggregates research materials, technologies and discoveries into an online, easy-to-search forum. Through the iBridge Web site, researchers and commercial end users can find what they need by using community tagging and open interfaces -- and then obtain the materials via e-commerce.
Sounds like the put up a bunch of research paper links, allow tagging, search and a forum and then once you click on the link -- and this is the best part -- you can obtain the material via "e-commerce", or by paying for it. I presume the "translated academic speak" feature is tagging and forums, which is hardly earth-shattering.
Also, there is a lot of research out there that simply cannot be reliably translated into lay speak. You can't take some research papers and condense it to "so yeah, send 12k of data through the pipe for best performance". There's a reason that academic papers are complicated, and believe me, it's not to confuse the public. And the papers on which you can translate reliably into layspeak are probably shit in the first place.
There's another site where you can access research papers (largely for free), citation lists, bibtex entries: Google scholar. Also, CiteSeer. Sure, there's no forums, but then there's Usenet and the age-old technique of email-the-author (actually works sometimes).
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
Admittedly offtopic, but I once knew a blonde who signed up for a lecture on boolean cubes.
She got really miffed and stormed out when she found out it wasn't about making soup.
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
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.
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
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.