OKHE1 Balancing the benefits of open knowledge with achieving value for partners who benefit commercially from academic expertise
It has been well argued in many places that there is great value in sharing knowledge, and that openness in academia facilitates the advancement of human knowledge by allowing more people to access previous findings. For example, open data means more people have access to more complete data; the more data available the better the overall quality and the more information and more accurate interpretation to be gained from it.
However, providing access to information and data can cost money, equally the process of generating new knowledge for research also costs money. Asking users to pay for access is one route to funding. This has traditionally been the model employed by academic journals, access to which tends to be funded by academic institutions for its staff and students, but at a level that is a barrier to the wider world, and indeed to some academic institutions. In any case it has been estimated that an average academic journal is only read in full by ten people [Ref: Prof, no-one is reading you], for academics to better influence policy and societal thinking, they need to increase their journalistic publishing via channels such as blogs & social media, articles in The Conversation, etc.
An example of funding publication costs by users without putting up a paywall is Wikipedia with its successful annual fundraising via small pledges from users, a route more recently introduced by The Conversation. However, while there are moves to increase pledge-funding in this way, these outlets importantly maintain free and open access.
Traditionally most academics pay little interest in translating their work to a lay audience, the syntax of their writing can demonstrate indifference to being understood, sentences that you can barely parse grammatically because they are so muddled with layers and layers of clauses. Humanities disciplines can be more guilty of this even than the sciences, which appear to be making more efforts towards breaking down its message, with recent examples such as the NHS research summaries now available for patients.
There are many audiences that can benefit from the sharing of knowledge generated via academic research, far beyond the academic community: this includes patients, policy makers, the general public, practitioners… and business.
In my role as Business Engagement Officer, I help connect academic researchers with non-academic partners to facilitate mutually beneficial collaborations and partnerships. Openness can only contribute positively in terms of awareness-raising of how academic findings contribute to answering business or societal problems. Increasing access to research outputs in formats to suit a variety of audiences including non-specialists is important in helping potential research collaborators identify and understand collaboration opportunities.
Along with colleagues in team such as Knowledge Exchange and Impact, we are here to help translate academic expertise into real-world impact, and to inform research through partnership with non-academic organisations.
A previous OKHE1 blog poster was disturbed at hearing the university described as open for business. This blog argues “shouldn’t the public get at least some direct benefit from public funds?” Well, I’d say of course there should be many societal impacts and benefits from knowledge and technologies created within universities, but what about where businesses are able to benefit and generate income utilising this knowledge and technology?
In a climate where research is done at a loss to universities and therefore subsidised from teaching fees, I would argue that we not have a responsibility to seek out new sources of research income, specifically by recognising the value outputs have to business and so ensuring they contribute to the costs of research. But with this comes conflict between open outputs and perceived value and competitive advantage that might be expected to be gained by non-academic partners who contribute to research costs.
Collaborative research is mutually beneficial, we benefit from access to knowledge, data, systems etc, partners benefit from new knowledge, academic methodology etc. But should businesses expect to benefit from academic outputs without contributing? Indeed, state aid rules around businesses benefiting directly form publicly funded research necessitate us to secure research funding contributions from business partners, this conflicts with the notion of wholly open access research outputs where businesses are contributing to gain insights their competitors do not have. However the entire notion of collaborative research is based on the benefits of shared knowledge to maximise research outputs…
Image — https://www.ft.com/content/bf4d4168-7aed-11e4-b630-00144feabdc0
In this blog Openness: The Digital Landscape, Executive Education and reflections on Prometheus Sue Wildgust discusses open content in the context of Executive Education, a significant contributor to University business income targets. She describes universities as “gatekeepers of knowledge” which is interesting and does acknowledge the value academic knowledge holds and the question of how advancement of knowledge is financed. Aligned with my own position from the Business Engagement function of the university, Sue makes the point that the commercial business model of Executive Education does not suit openness; however there is a free-to-access programme for public and third-sector organisations to access academic expertise. With this in mind Sue shifts the gatekeeper description concluding that Universities are “gate openers” as there is knowledge on either side of the gate. This fits with the perspective of the Business Engagement & Knowledge Exchange team which is shifting to focus on Knowledge Exchange and Innovation, highlighting the value business partnerships have to the university as well as the other way around.
Conversely, Shumit Mandal also argues the point from the perspective of Executive Education as a premium service that generates income for the university and that the value of academic expertise to business partners is recognised via this transactional relationship and should not be something given away for free. I enjoyed the boldness of his blog post “If You’re Good at Something, Never Do It for Free.”
For part two of this small study I intend to explore the business-academic relationship and how this can be balanced with academic freedom and openness.
