Google Has Been Paying Academic Researchers Who Write Favorable Papers: Report (cnbc.com)

Posted by msmash on Tuesday July 11, 2017 @08:50AM from the smells-fishy dept.

Google has paid researchers and academics who have worked on projects that support the company's positions in battles with regulators, a report in The Wall Street Journal (paywalled) said on Tuesday. From a report: Google's practice might not sound all that different from lobbying, but The Wall Street Journal revealed that some of the professors, including a Paul Heald from the University of Illinois, didn't disclose Google's payments. Heald is one of "more than a dozen" such professors who accepted money from Google, according to The Wall Street Journal. Google has reason to try to get as many folks on its side as it can. The company has faced almost constant scrutiny for its business practices, most recently a record antitrust fine of $2.7 billion in the European Union. Tens of thousands of dollars to professors here and there could have helped it avoid that fine, and others.

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Deplorable by budsetr · 2017-07-11 08:55 · Score: 2, Insightful

Just like every other company that does it. I'm looking at you Big Oil.
Hard to tell whether they've done anything wrong by imidan · 2017-07-11 09:09 · Score: 5, Insightful

Okay, so Google paid a bunch of researchers to do research related to Google. That's how most privately-funded research grants work. Groups don't pay researchers to research things that aren't relevant to the group's purpose. So this part of the article should not be particularly surprising.
As academic researchers, we have a responsibility to disclose potential conflicts of interest and sources of funding for our work. It is in our best interest to do so because our credibility can be called into question when it is revealed that we omitted this information from a paper, intentionally or not.
The article is light on details, but if one researcher failed to report a conflict and/or funding source, that's his fault, not Google's. The context is unclear, however. What paper did he publish that failed to acknowledge Google's funding support? Was it about or related to Google? Did he have reason to believe that the paper was insufficiently related to create a conflict of interest? Without this information, it's hard to estimate whether anyone in this scenario has actually done anything wrong.