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Education Science

Freeing the Good Stuff From University Labs 87

Posted by kdawson from the window-into-research dept.
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.
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Freeing the Good Stuff From University Labs More

Freeing the Good Stuff From University Labs

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  • 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!
    • 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.

    • Re:Where's the beef?! (Score:4, Informative)

      by caffeinemessiah ( 918089 ) on Thursday February 01, 2007 @01:57PM (#17847696) Journal
      Agree with the poster. Here's the summary for the lazy:

      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).

      • OK, I just checked the actualy iBridge network. Here are some tasty papers and their "human readable" summaries:

        Paper:Apparatus and Device for Analyzing Nerve Conduction
        Human-readable summary: an improved device for evaluating the performance of nerve or muscle

        Paper:Methods and Systems for the Identification of Components of Mammalian Cells as Targets for Therapeutic Agents
        Human-readable: Methods and Systems for the Identification of Components of Mammalian Cells as Targets for Therapeutic Agents

        Pa

      • Also, there is a lot of research out there that simply cannot be reliably translated into lay speak.
        What's the matter, you didn't like the "Total Idiot's Guide to the Equivalence of Seiberg-Witten and Casson Invariants for Homology 3-Spheres"?

        • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

          by Aqua_boy17 ( 962670 )
          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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by radtea ( 464814 )
        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.

        Furthermore the problem of discovery is trivial compared to the problem of interfacing with academics. It's hard to underestimate the impedance mismatch between academic scientists and commericial developers and engineers.

        Most academics think that if an expert operator has been able to do something once o
        • Most academics think that if an expert operator has been able to do something once on a single dataset they have "solved the problem"

          Where are you getting this from? I speak as an academic, and I have found very few academics who think like this, and they definitely aren't respected either in industry or academia. Very few academics will conclude that one technique, much less one paper or operator, has solved any significant problem.

          • 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.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by radtea ( 464814 )
            Where are you getting this from?

            I'm getting this from the better part of a decade working professionally as an interface between academics and developers in a variety of startup companies. I'm an ex-academic myself, and know the size of the gap between the academic and commercial mindsets because I've had to cross it.

            My comment is an overstatement (this is /. after all, and you don't get modded up without a bit of theatrical embellishment) but I stand by the gist of it. What I have consistently found is
    • 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...]
  • Please, don't add your personal overtones.

  • So basically.. (Score:4, Funny)

    by joshetc ( 955226 ) on Thursday February 01, 2007 @01:02PM (#17846566)
    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?

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Laur ( 673497 )

      Well I want to see boobs, lots of them.
      I don't understand. You apparently have internet access, yet you are having trouble seeing boobs?
      • He wants to see your man-boobs.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by kabocox ( 199019 )
        I don't understand. You apparently have internet access, yet you are having trouble seeing boobs?

        Nah, he just want's a slashdot article about boobs and a thread where slashdotters have gathered what they consider the best open source boobs on the internet.
      • My internet access is Pipex, so any boobs I find are forever tainted by the fact that they arrive at my screen through a service David Hasselhoff advertises...

        Oh yhes, he is teh king of the internets
  • 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...
    • The large problem with academic research not making it into commercial products is a lack of an unfair advantage. Researchers need to learn to apply for patents. The fact is that most things people in academia develop would be very costly to bring onto the market. As a result, whoever is doing it wants to make sure that no one else is going to be able to simply reverse engineer their new product and pop out a copy in six months. This is especially an issue with drugs because of the very high cost of getting

  • Stealing! (Score:5, Funny)

    by nuxx ( 10153 ) on Thursday February 01, 2007 @01:10PM (#17846746) Homepage
    At first I thought this article was going to be pointers on "freeing the good stuff" chemistry-wise from the lab stores.

    Darn.

  • Classic catch-22 (Score:4, Insightful)

    by kebes ( 861706 ) on Thursday February 01, 2007 @01:14PM (#17846852) Journal
    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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Red Flayer ( 890720 )

      Academics are already very busy, and finding time to post summaries is going to be difficult.

      That's what undergrad research assistants are for. It's also something that could easily fall under a university's PR budget -- loading the site with contributions from your organization looks pretty good to prospective students and their parents, let alone companies who are interested in co-funding research.
      • > 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 g

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by penguinbroker ( 1000903 )
      I agree that the idea has potential to be incredibly useful. But this is highly contingent on the quality and consistency of the "community tagging" that this services hopes to exploit. Working in research labs at a reputable engineering research university I find that the most difficult thing is formulating your problem into discernable parts. Once you formulate the problem into 'academic speak' so to say, finding the solution (or finding if there already is a solution) is straight forward. That's kind of
    • Actually, there is a good reason academics might go out of their way to make their work as public as possible. Reputation. Researchers love it, they glorify in it, they consider it the ultimate reward. And researchers get a real kick out of someone using or expanding on their work. I know this because I do research (sporadically) myself.

      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

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DarenN ( 411219 )
        The reputation that they want they can only get within their specific community, though, so most of them don't care as long as they're one of the big names in their field.

        google scholar is excellent resource, by the way, I prefer it to CiteSeer. Then I use http://liinwww.ira.uka.de/bibliography/index.html [ira.uka.de], the computer science bibliography, for the reference if I use the paper. I'm researching something to do with computer science, by the way :)

  • Already happening (Score:5, Informative)

    by cfulmer ( 3166 ) on Thursday February 01, 2007 @01:16PM (#17846872) Journal
    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.

    • Re:Already happening (Score:5, Insightful)

      by The_Wilschon ( 782534 ) on Thursday February 01, 2007 @01:48PM (#17847498) Homepage

      researchers typically now conduct their research with an eye toward its commercial practicability.
      And you think this is an entirely good thing? Sure it has some good points. The universities get more money quicker. However, the general state of things previously was that academics did pie in the sky research, much of which never winds up being "useful" (although I would argue that increasing our general knowledge is useful...), and then industry would take what it could use from there and develop it for commercial practicability. Notice, however, that industry doing research with an eye toward commercial practicability rarely comes up with the new, ground-breaking, really great stuff. Its all kind of humdrum usage of established knowledge. The great advances (which later enable commercial applications) come from way out there pie in the sky research with no view to commercial practicability.

      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.

      I think that Bayh-Dole may very well cause university research to fall into the same boat as industrial research. You won't be able to start a project until you can prove that it will have some commercial application. That's not a good state to be in.

      BTW, this "vegas-like attitude" doesn't exist. Nobody in universities actively tries to keep their research to themselves, because that would harm them more than anyone else. Academia runs on reputations, and you can't build up a reputation (and thus get grant money) unless you release your research. The reason that a lot of university research stays in the universities is that nobody comes asking for it. 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!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by kabocox ( 199019 )
        BTW, this "vegas-like attitude" doesn't exist. Nobody in universities actively tries to keep their research to themselves, because that would harm them more than anyone else. Academia runs on reputations, and you can't build up a reputation (and thus get grant money) unless you release your research. The reason that a lot of university research stays in the universities is that nobody comes asking for it. Nearly all research professors are delighted to talk the ear off anyone who shows an interest in their

      • Bell labs was an artifact of scamming regulations. (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Ungrounded Lightning ( 62228 ) on Thursday February 01, 2007 @06:01PM (#17851768) Journal
        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...

        • 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...

          Perhaps that's why John Rowell, a major physicist and former director of Bell Labs, wrote in a 1992 Physics Today article, "Condensed Matter Physics in a Market Economy," that it's really important to have some industrial labs do basic research... but you'd be smart to let the other guy do it.

    • Corporate funding often stitches up IP rights before the IP is even developed. Now universities often need to keep stuff sectret until patents etc are in place.

      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 a

    • "...researchers typically now conduct their research with an eye toward its commercial practicability."

      This is not true. I think that, as you say you've worked as a lawyer advising startups that want to commercialize university research, you've got a selection bias. Recently I went to a meeting between members of different life-sciences departments and the university's technology transfer office, along with reps from one of the companies it partners with. Of about 50 researchers there, only a handful
    • 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 p

  • I want to see some patent protection (Score:5, Insightful)

    by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Thursday February 01, 2007 @01:17PM (#17846888) Homepage Journal
    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.

    • Re:I want to see some patent protection (Score:5, Insightful)

      by PriceIke ( 751512 ) on Thursday February 01, 2007 @02:30PM (#17848300)

      US Constitution, Article I, Section 8: To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;

      Patent law is DRM for researchers.

      • If the patented invention is done with tax dollars it should be considered a "work for hire" and the patent should be owned by the US Govt. The US Govt. should then be required to provide royalty free licensing to Citizens and resident aliens, and charge foreign users/corporations royalties.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dkf ( 304284 )

          If the patented invention is done with tax dollars it should be considered a "work for hire" [...]

          I'd agree, except what about the case where the tax dollars only pay for part of the costs of the creation of the invention? This is going to be the case quite often, since a Full Economic Costing model results in inventions becoming much more costly in practice (since it is vital that the contract for the research include such money as is required to pay for things like the building insurance for the facility

          • Doesn't matter which occurs just so long as the agreement is in place and a matter of public record before the money is awarded.

            No "company decides to buy to government out after it has been licensed and then demanding royalties from the licensees".

  • Bayh-Dole Act is the first door/barrier (Score:5, Informative)

    by Fysiks Wurks ( 949375 ) on Thursday February 01, 2007 @01:19PM (#17846924)
    The Bayh-Dole Act ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh-Dole_Act [wikipedia.org] ) confers univeristies the IP rights to their discoveries.

  • Wait a minute, "Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" [google.com].

    How long until they start a similar project?

  • OT: Opinion Center (Score:3, Interesting)

    by cain ( 14472 ) on Thursday February 01, 2007 @01:28PM (#17847120) Journal
    What the hell is up with the new "Opinion Center" thingy? It looks like I can minimize it, but I cannot. The one and only link, labeled "intel" is actully a doubleclick.net link. On the right a mouse-over pops up a huge ugly green window which contains an "article" by the "OSTG Marketing Dept." Advertising creeps in more and more. Obnoxious.

    WTF?

    • I can minimize mine. Firefox 2.0.0.1 on Ubuntu Edgy.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by spun ( 1352 )
      You know, I'm usually the first to jump on the anti-advertising, anti-corporate bandwagon, but I see no problem with this new feature. It's unobtrusive and a great way to seperate out "slashvertisements" from real stories. If I have an interest in seeing product announcements or opinion pieces by Intel, I now have a place to look. Honestly, this is how advertising should work: it's there if you want it, it's unobtrusive if you don't.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by cain ( 14472 )

        You know, I'm usually the first to jump on the anti-advertising, anti-corporate bandwagon, but I see no problem with this new feature.

        It's not a feature. It's an advertisement.

        It's unobtrusive and a great way to seperate out "slashvertisements" from real stories.

        So this means there will be be no more slashvertisments? Awesome. I suspect though that these will be used in conjunction with regular old run-of-the-mill slashvertisements.

        If I have an interest in seeing product announcements or opinion pieces by Intel, I now have a place to look.

        Yes, you're right. There was no place before this to find PR newswire reports from Intel. I'm surprised that Intel is even still around as a company as, before this, it had nowhere to put its fluff marketing PR articles. Slashdot has saved Intel. They should probably get a kick back or

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by spun ( 1352 )
          It's one little box in the corner! It's not even an ad until you click it. How is that obtrusive?

          My God! I can't believe I'm defending advertising. But I like slashdot, I want to see them make money, and this is one of the least irritating ways they can do that. You're probably right about slahvertisements continuing, though.

          Consider this: which would you rather read, a magazine with adds scattered obtrusively throughout the publication, or one where the advertising came in a special supplement you could te

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by cain ( 14472 )

            Consider this: which would you rather read, a magazine with adds scattered obtrusively throughout the publication, or one where the advertising came in a special supplement you could tear out and throw away?

            Straw man. Or maybe false dictomy. The actual choice, using your analogy, would be: which would you rather read, a magazine with ads scattered obtrusively throughout the publication, or one with ads scattered obtrusively throughout the publication and advertising in a special supplement you could tear out and throw away?

            I'm gonna make you defend advertising even more. :)

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by spun ( 1352 )
              False dichotomy, not a straw man.

              I can't do it. It hurts my brain to try to defend advertising. Suffice it to say, I'm not particularly annoyed by this instance of it. I also don't think it will be particularly successful, givin the nature of the /. audience.

              Actually, you know what I find annoying? The name. Opinion center. As if, of all the sections on slashdot, THIS is the place to go if you want an opinion! It implies that this is the place for IMPORTANT, MEANINGFUL opinions, as opposed to the useless op

              • Re: (Score:1)

                by cain ( 14472 )

                I can't do it. It hurts my brain to try to defend advertising. Suffice it to say, I'm not particularly annoyed by this instance of it. I also don't think it will be particularly successful, givin the nature of the /. audience.

                Agreed.

                Actually, you know what I find annoying? The name. Opinion center. As if, of all the sections on slashdot, THIS is the place to go if you want an opinion! It implies that this is the place for IMPORTANT, MEANINGFUL opinions, as opposed to the useless opinions of the unwashed masses elsewhere.

                Yeah, that's the marketing spin. It is horrible and just sticks in my craw. Blah.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by cain ( 14472 )
        Sorry for two replies, but I just had to point you to this general comment about marketing:

        http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=219932&cid=178 45328 [slashdot.org]

        Enjoy. :)

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by spun ( 1352 )
          To me, advertising and marketing are on a moral par with masturbating in public. It's not particularly productive, it's offensive and annoying, but it doesn't really harm anyone. This is the equivilant of a nice private room where one can go to masturbate and only other perverts who are into that sort of thing have to watch.

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by cain ( 14472 )

            To me, advertising and marketing are on a moral par with masturbating in public. It's not particularly productive, it's offensive and annoying, but it doesn't really harm anyone.

            I disagree. The purpose of advertising and marketing to convince people to buy more of one guy's widgets than the other guy's widgets. This usually involves lying and attempting to sway people based on anything, anything at all. It is morally equivalent to lying for money. And usually they are just hired guns, they are not even attempting to sell something they've made or produced. Advertising and marketing does harm people - it spreads misinformation and lies. It overtly (sometimes) does pyschological h

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by spun ( 1352 )
              Shit. Last time I play devil's advocate on an issue like this. I COULD come back and claim, "But that's not the fault of advertising, it's LYING that's to blame!" but I happen to agree with you. It is lying for money.
  • [humor on the lines of phdcomics]
    yes, please release us grad students from the shackles of these tyrannic advisors!
    [/humor]
  • This is a rather Orwellian use of the word "freeing". What they are really describing is the furtherance of a Bayh-Dole world in which research is only considered to be valuable if it can be licensed (i.e., kept from use by others, except at the licensors whim).

    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

  • ...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&
  • 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.

  • Been There; Done That (Score:4, Funny)

    by Kozar_The_Malignant ( 738483 ) on Thursday February 01, 2007 @03:24PM (#17849246)
    During my university career, my fellow students and I freed quite a bit of "good stuff" from our labs... ethanol, useful glassware, etc.
  • 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.

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