I am happy to read of Donald Kennedy's [Editorial, "Science and secrecy," 4 Aug, p. 724] and
Spyros Andreaopoulos' concerns regarding the
evolving "marriage" between industry and academia, if only because
misery loves company. Lest anyone believe that these issues only face
private universities like Stanford, or only those in the biomedical
sciences, I can attest to the same presures applying at my state
university, and in computer science. From my perspective, neither
Kennedy nor Andreaopoulos go far enough.
In the situations I see most, administrative and legal staff within
the university are concerned with intellectual property claims on
software developed as part of funded research. Having the university
ensure that public knowledge remains in the public domain, and drafting
conflict-of-interest policies that safeguard relations between
faculty, industry, and especially students who can get hit in the
crossfire, is what we should expect of these public institutions. But
in these modern times, the university seems more concerned with its own
share, over and above any other parties. In software for example,
"open source" licencing is beginning to look very good to academic
developers who want to ensure their efforts remain useful and
available to their colleagues and the rest of the world; but to a
profit-motivated university lawyer, Open Source looks like a loss of
revenue! In an emerging field like computational biology (where it
seems likely that we will have the worst of both software and
biomedical IP issues!) the stakes are enormous. Genomic projects are
already generating huge wealth; active academic researchers deciding
where and how to publish will have great influence on how these assets
are ultimately distributed. Recent news events (like the University
of Rochester's recent patent award for cox-2 inhibitors) ensures that
other universities are only going to try that much harder to (as
comedian Chris Rock likes to say) "make sure we're getting paid!"
But the general progression toward tighter academia/industry ties
has
been clear for decades. Given that industry is now well entrenched in
the strategic plans of most big research universities, faculty who have
made career choices to produce and then disseminate public knowledge
must ask two questions: Do universities with these same quaint,
old-fashioned goals still exist? If they do, can you afford to live
and pursue your science on budgets that do not depend on industrial
subsidies?
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