Category Archives: Policy

Obama promises to restore science to its rightful place

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President Obama has made the headlines with his speech to the National Academy of Sciences. First of all, he is apparently unusual among Presidents for attending the NAS annual meeting, but he also made a powerful speech promising to put science and research at the heart of the recovery of the US, with substantial increases in investment.The full text of his speech can be found on the New York Times Dot Earth blog which will be running a commentary space on the speech.

It is instructive to compare Obama’s proposals with the policy developments we are facing in South Africa. The IPR Act of 2008 is based in the USA Bayh-Dole Act  of 1980. Not to labour the point too crudely, that is 29 years ago. We are forgetting the fundamental injunction that policy formulation needs to look forward, not backwards if it really to advance the country. The philosophy behind Bayh-Dole was informed by a Reagon-style economic vision that imploded in 2008 and one that the Obama adminstration is aiming at undoing. That outdated view says that the economy is all and that if universities act like businesses and commercialise their research, using patenting and revenue-seeking, then this will bring benefit to the country through economic growth and trickle-down. In my next few blogs I will be exploring the debate on how this has really worked (or rather, not worked) and what alternatives are now being proposed in other countries for effective innovation.

But for now, let us celebrate Obama’s speech and see what vision it embodies, rather than the dysfunctional ‘managemented’ view we currently live with. He talks of the crisis: ‘a medical system that holds the promise of unlocking new cures and

treatments — attached to a health care system that holds the potential for bankruptcy to families and businesses; a system of energy that powers our economy, but simultaneously endangers our planet; threats to our security that seek to exploit the very interconnectedness and openness so essential to our prosperity; and challenges in a global marketplace which links the derivative trader on Wall Street. The main focus is on medicine and energy for a sustainable environment, both with a strong human perspective.

Obama’s vision is of an interdisciplinary, international, collaborative and open scientific system. For a start, the policy system is being opened up:

As part of this effort, we’ve already launched a web site that allows individuals to not only make recommendations to achieve this goal, but to collaborate on those recommendations. It’s a small step, but one that’s creating a more transparent, participatory and democratic government. Then science itself is perceived as a collaborative open system: In biomedicine… we can harness the historic convergence between life sciences and physical sciences that’s underway today; undertaking public projects — in the spirit of the Human Genome Project — to create data and capabilities that fuel discoveries in tens of thousands of laboratories; and identifying and overcoming scientific and bureaucratic barriers to rapidly translating scientific breakthroughs into diagnostics and
therapeutics that serve patients.

And of course, with someone like Harold Varmus leading his scientific team, one hopes that open access will be on the agenda of a new scientific system.

Science is seen as not only the ivory tower (although basic science is given a strong emphasis) but scientists are preceived as potential activists. Applied research is valued and Obama places a strong emphasis on the potential role of the young and of the role that scientists can play in taking their knowledge into the schools and the community to help enthuse and inspire a new generation.

Ultimately, in typical Obama vein, it is a moral vision that drives this iniitiave, although substantial funding is going to drive it:

Science can’t answer every question, and indeed, it seems at times the more we plumb the mysteries of the physical world, the more humble we must be. Science cannot supplant our ethics or our values, our principles or our faith. But science can inform those things and help put those values — these moral sentiments, that faith — can put those things to work — to feed a child, or to heal the sick, to be good stewards of this Earth.

We need to ask whether our policies are in line with this renewed vision from the country that drives sceintific research in the world and if we are ready to collaborate with Obama’s USA.

IPR Act Regulations – IP under uncertainly in South Africa

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Derek Keats. the Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Knowledge management at Wits University has posted a series of blogs in the proposed Regulations for the implementation of the IPR Act. He thinks – and I agree – that they will probably be unworkable and that they will almost certainly act as a hindrance and not a help to research effectiveness in the country.

Some of his comments:

Most importantly, innovation thrives in the absence of impediments. Every time a researcher must go to NIPMO for permission, there is another barrier to innovation. More barriers equates to less innovation. This is a sine quo non, and cannot be changed… These regulations will stiffle innovation, not just in software, but in almost every sphere of research endeavour. They are bad for innovation, they are bad for research, they are bad for business, and they are bad for South Africa. Research innovation is something that is made from a harvest of passion and energy, and the capacity for the unfettered creativity that universities make possible. Anything that reduces that capacity for unfettered creativity, and creates the risk of a passion drought will undermine innovation and lead to less, not more, innovation. This is something that I know with as much certainty as I know I have 10 fingers (currently). Much as software patents favour existing large companies, and make
it difficult for a new company to become large, these regulatins will have a small negative impact on the research superstars, but will make it much more difficult to become a new superstar, and will drive passionate people away from research into other carreers. Academic freedom is important to people, and people do innovation. Trample on it at your peril!If you look at the range of work that these regulations cover, which
is effectively all knowledge work undertaken with public funds, the range of knowledge needed to make non-spurious decisions is enormous. The level of talent that will be needed for the imlementing body,
NIPMO, to work is very high. These are not decisions that can reasonably be expected to be taken by inexperienced people who have just completed a masters degree. They need experienced researchers, with doctorates and many years of research and development experience. Such people simply do not exist in South Africa. They could be taken out of the Universities, but then that would undermine the innovation process they are supposed to be managing. So where will they come from?

Finally, he makes a set of useful suggestions on how things could and should work:

  • Leave critical decisions close to the site of the action,
    where people are most familiar with the challenges and opportunities
    and can act in an agile manner with the minimum of delays;
  • Ensure
    that the services are available to assist with commercialization of
    research, including legal services, product development assistance, and
    that these are available with minimum of fuss whether a proprietary or
    open source business model is followed;
  • Ensure that there
    is a National fund to help startups fight patent challenges from patent
    trolls and other holders of spurious patents, especially large
    multinational corporations with large patent portfolios which may
    contain numerous dubious patents;
  • Recognize that the vast
    majority of researchers are not doing research that will lead to
    commercial products, and do not bring the whole innovation regime in
    South Africa under these regulations, where social and cultural
    innovation will be stiffled; rather provide means to assist and inform
    such researchers to find commercially or socially beneficial uses for
    their research when they tell you they would like your help;
  • Where
    software and documentation in various forms are concerned, accept the
    National Policy on Free and Open Source as also being an important
    guide for action among responsible, knowledgeable researchers.

I hope Wits University’s reposnse to the Regulations will incorporate all o of this.

Those IPR Act Regulations – are they unconstitional?

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Today Legal Brief has posted a brief referring to Andrew Rens’s blogpost arguing that the Draft Regulations for the implementation of the IPR Act of 2008 are unconstitutional. Legal Brief quotes a telling passage from Andrew’s post:

Andrew Rens, Intellectual Property Fellow at the Shuttleworth Foundation in Cape Town, says in a blog on the Creative Commons blog site that the regulations ‘are simply unworkable, intending to funnel the entire research output of SA through a convoluted series of bureaucratic filters’. Rens points out that almost all advanced scientific research in SA takes place through multinational consortia. These consortia enable scientists to share data and to contribute their skills to complex research. ‘Taking part in international consortia is a minimum necessity for SA scientists,’ he says. However, the regulations ‘represent an attempt to squash multinational, multi-institutional research consortia into the form of agreements between a corporation and a research institution’. Rens says this is, in effect, a ban on participation in multinational research consortia, ‘since research consortia have their own rules on how research may be used’. Says Rens: ‘In other words, researchers may not choose to join the only, or best research consortium in the world, but must instead cede their academic freedom to bureaucrats, and not only to bureaucrats but bureaucrats impelled by the single objective of patenting whatever they can.’ He says for this reason, the regulations are unconstitutional.

What Andrew’s comments highlight is that the Act and the Regulations designed to enforce them- and ‘force’ is an appropriate word here – are some 30 years out of date and completely out of tune with the way research is being conducted in the world’s leading universities in the 21st century, with high levels of collaboration. What is worse, they are out of line with the realities of how research can best contribute to the national good, through flexible strategies, effective and open dissemination and vehicles that are aligned with the needs of the poorest in our society, something that patents don’t always do well. I cannot help recalling Yochai Benkler’s striking indictment of the patent system, in his seminal book, The Wealth of Networks: ‘The above-marginal-cost prices paid in …. poorer countries [as a result of patents] are purely regressive redistribution. The morality of this redistribution from the world’s poor to the world’s rich has never been confronted or defended in the European or American public spheres. It simply goes unnoticed.’ It is certainly unnoticed in these Draft Regulations, which seem intent on forcing the maximum commericialisation of South African research, at whatever cost.

A policy workshop on access to data

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On 27 and 28 September, the South African Department of Science and Technology (DST) convened a high-level two-day workshop on access to research data. The workshop was designed to address what South Africa’s response should be in relation to the OECD Declaration, Principles and Guidelines on Access to Research Data from Publicly Funded Research. A hint as to why this workshop was being convened now came from a press cutting included in the conference pack, reporting that South Africa is being considered as an additional member of the OECD, something that would be a major boost to the country if it were to come about. Another reason was mentioned by Owen Njamela, from the Chief Directorate, R&D Investments at the DST: that in the last few months the DST has announced a considerable increase in its strategic R&D targets for the next decade as a way of increasing the country’s international competitiveness. This means that the number of postgraduate degrees and the levels of research output will need to grow radically in the next decade. It was good to see these targets being linked to open approaches to knowledge and information sharing, in contrast to the restrictive and lock-down approach of the Draft Bill on IPR for Publicly Funded Research published for comment a few months ago (see my blog entry of 13 July 2007). What the workshop was after, Njamela said, was to establish what it would take to create a really effective data sharing system in South Africa.

Because I see this as an important event, I am going to blog in this post the key outcomes, decisions and forward planning that hat emerged from the workshop and then provide, here and on the OpeningScholarship project blog additional postings on the keynote speeches and the presentations from local speakers, as well as some South African case studies. Keynote speeches were by Paul Uhlir of the US National Academies of Science and CODATA, Bernard Minter, Chair of the World Data Centre System at ICSU and Professor of Geophysics at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, University of California San Diego and Beatriz Torres, Programme Officer from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility.

The key understanding that emerged from the workshop was that, although there are a number of legitimate limitations on openness when it comes to research data – such as official secrets, personal privacy and the proprietary rights of private sector research – the default option, as spelled out by the OECD Guidelines, should be for open access and restrictions should be the exception and not the rule, only invoked with good reason. This is particularly important when data has been developed from publicly funded research. While locking up data in proprietary systems increases the fragmentation and cost and can become a barrier to the conduct of science, the keynote speakers argued that open access makes data available for use across disciplines and countries, allows for automated knowledge discovery, improves the potential for verification and accuracy and facilitates North-South and South-South transfer.

There are strategic reasons for ensuring that research data is properly disseminated and curated in South Africa. As the ASSAf Report on Scholarly Publishing in South Africa made clear, South Africa needs to increase its research visibility, needs to grow its output of high-quality publications and attract a younger cohort of scholars. And, as the ASSAf programme grows the output of local journals, I argued tin my presentation that there need to be links between scholarly publications and underlying data sets if the maximum benefits are to be gained from research investment. Looking forward, the trends are towards greater interactivity between scientific journal articles and the underlying data, for collaboratories and virtual workspaces, for the additional layers of interpretation that can be offered by semantically-rich XML documents, and for automated analysis, abstraction and correlation of data. Open Access makes this much easier.

An important issue for South Africa is the need to retain and grow the numbers of young researchers. The current system of evaluating scholars through their output of journal articles and the citation impact of these articles provides a disincentive for researchers who have grown up in a digital world, who expect rapid results in a collaborative global community of scholars and who recognise the need for high-speed supercomputing to access and analyse the vast and growing amount of data now available. Some participants felt that policy-makers are limping behind the development of new research approaches and that South Africa needed to become more forward-looking in its research policies – in fact the keynote speakers challenged South Africa to leap the technology gap to take its place at the forefront of developments.

Action plan

At the end of the workshop, Owen Njamela from the Chief Directorate, R&D Investments in the DST proposed an action plan,
based on the recommendations of a series of presentations and workshop sessions. The Department would:

  • Explore the recommendation made by the workshop participants for an audit of skills, curricula, databases, and systems.

  • Draft a narrative report from the meeting into a draft policy document/ guidelines for data management, access and reuse.

  • Undertake internal departmental consultation to ensure awareness by all departments and the executive of the DST and to identify human capital.

  • Consultation with other departments – Director-General forums and research forums within government and in the industry cluster system. (There is a framework of bilateral cooperation with other departments, Njamela said and it is also important to include government departments with their own science councils, like Mintek in the Department of Mining.)

  • Consultation with universities/science councils (concurrent)

  • Presentation of a policy to Cabinet (June 2008, when the government considers policy priorities).

  • Funding considerations proposed to National Treasury

  • Implementation (2008 financial year). There might be institutions active ahead of
    that implementation.

Policy recommendations – Research Publication Policy in SA

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My Policy Paper for the OSI International Policy Fellowship concludes with a number of policy recommendations, at international, national and institutional level. Here is a brief summary of these recommendations:

Summary of policy recommendations

Advocacy and research

There is a need for advocacy to promote the importance of effective and broad-based research dissemination as a way of
achieving greater impact for African research, nationally, regionally and globally. Such advocacy would argue for the recognition of a wider range of publications, addressed not only to scholars, but aimed at the broader
community. Alongside this, advocacy is needed to spell out the advantages of Open Access – particularly in the developing world context – in increasing research impact and reach.

Advocacy campaigns would need to be accompanied by the development of effective case studies to provide working
examples of how research dissemination can be transformed and what impact this transformation is having.

International and regional policies

Access and participation: At an international level, policy initiatives that address the global knowledge
divide need to move from an approach driven by the idea of access – in other words the idea that developing world problems would be solved by providing greater access to global knowledge resources – to
a recognition of the need for greater participation by African countries in knowledge production. This would also require international policy documents to move beyond narrowly-focused proprietary and commercially-driven metrics for the evaluation of research performance to recognition of the importance of non-proprietary, collaborative approaches to knowledge production and dissemination.

Access to publicly funded research: An important strand of such a policy environment would be the creation of policies
supporting Open Access to publicly funded research, along the lines proposed by the OECD Declaration and the Salvador and Bangalore Declarations.

The WIPO Development Agenda: This programme (which is now showing signs of being accepted for implementation[1]) if implemented, could deliver a less punitive and more open international IP dispensation, offering more equitable access to knowledge and more flexible regimes for the fostering of innovation and creativity in developing countries.

Regional collaboration: Regional collaborative initiatives for the advancement of scholarly communications, such as SciELO are recommended, as is the development of an African citation index.

National Policy

Intellectual Property Law: Greater openness for research dissemination could be achieved without the need for
changes in IP law. However, there is a need to address the inconsistencies in South African IP legislation in relation to Fair Dealing and special provisions for educational and library use. It would be desirable to investigate the
question of territorial rights and their impact on the cost of imported books.

Access to research from Public Funding: Policies for Access to Research from Public Funding could provide mandates for the deposit of research publications in institutional repositories, for national harvesting, opening up the availability of research knowledge.

Support for Open Access research publication: As recommended by the Academy of Science of South Africa, there needs to be financial and logistical support for scholarly publication at a national level. This could include the provision of funding derived from top-slicing a small percentage of the Department of Education remuneration for research publication in accredited journals. An alternative listing and indexing system for journals could contribute to raising quality standards while at the same time ensuring the national relevance of journals. Support for Open Access publication would increase visibility and impact.

Support for a wider range of publications: However, support for research dissemination needs to go beyond the traditional focus on journal articles if research publication is really to impact on national development goals. At national
level, a more positive rating for publication in books and conference proceedings is needed as well as the recognition of the importance of other, less traditional publications, such as research reports and popularisations. Electronic publication needs clearer recognition.

Social impact measures: There is a need to initiate research into the development of social impact criteria as opposed to the current, proprietary and commercially-focused metrics.


Institutional policies

Academic reward and promotions: If research publication is to be development-focused and not only geared to
international prestige, then institutions would need to address a wider range of criteria for academic reward and promotion, more closely geared to the development-focused goals of national higher education research and innovation policies.

Integrated communications management: There would be a good deal to be gained if institutions were to take an
integrated approach to scholarly communications and the use of digital media. This could include policies for the creation and management of institutional Open Access repositories; support for the management of the contracts signed by academic authors; and addressing the publishing needs of the institution and providing support for research dissemination and publication. In other words, the institutions would endorse the centrality of research dissemination and publication, as well as access to research knowledge.

[1] See, for example,
the Knowledge Ecology International Statement on the conclusion
of the Development Agenda negotiations in June 2007.