for
the Amherst campus of the University of Massachusetts
Nov.
10, 2000
|
Proposed rules on research data criticized by Sarah R. Buchholz, Chronicle staff 
proposed policy on retention of and access to research
data was the subject of an extensive debate at the Nov. 2 Faculty
Senate meeting. Chemical Engineering professor Peter Monson, co-chair of the senate's Research Council, presented a special report regarding the policy, moving that the senate approve the report. Senate members eventually voted to send the report back to the Rules Committee and the Research Council for further work, and several attendees suggested that the Massachusetts Society of Professors (MSP) and the Graduate Employee Organization (GEO) will need to be involved because the policy raises questions about intellectual property rights of faculty and graduate students. Monson told the group that there are a number of reasons to adopt such a policy: "increased interaction with the private sector, scientific challenges to data, handling of data in cases of scientific misconduct, litigation over ownership rights to data, and expanded Freedom of Information access that's required." "All of these things have been increasing," he said, "and it's going to be more and more of a problem for the University without having a formal policy on access to and retention of research data." Monson said the policy would ensure that research is recorded and archived appropriately and available for review under appropriate circumstances. "The policy also asserts University ownership of research data consistent with this policy, government regulation and prevailing practice at other institutions," he said. "It provides guidelines of what constitutes research data. ... It assigns the PI (principal investigator), who's the chief researcher on a project, ... the primary responsibility for custody of the data and it gives a procedure for providing access to the data. "The policy does not expand University ownership of intellectual property into areas which are exempted under the existing intellectual property policy. It does not redefine faculty roles and responsibilities. There are some things that faculty have to do under this policy, but I think most people would agree that those things fall within the context of normal, good professional practice, and we aren't really going beyond that. Finally, I want to mention that it doesn't disregard the importance of the PI as having the primary role in the custody of data." Monson said some research faculty have had problems with junior researchers leaving the University at the close of a project, taking the original data with them. If the data belong to the University, he said, this problem would be largely eliminated. But opponents of the proposed policy said it would interfere with existing intellectual property agreements. "My main concern is that the University appears to claim ownership of all research data produced by faculty members, regardless of the source of funding," said Economics professor Carol Heim. "The University of Massachusetts policy on retention of and access to research data should be consistent with the intellectual property policy. That policy includes a category of 'exempted scholarly work' in which the University waives ownership interest. Within this category are text books, class notes, research proposals, classroom presentation and instruction, research articles, research monographs, student theses and dissertations and other items. If the University waives ownership interest in these items, it also should waive ownership interest in research data that are used solely to generate such items. "The intellectual property policy also distinguishes between intellectual property that is made, discovered or created with significant use of University resources and that which is not. Only intellectual property that involves significant use of University resources is owned by the University." "The issue of intellectual property is ... part of the collective bargaining agreement," said MSP president Jane Giacobbe Miller. "If the administration wants to pursue modification of this policy, they need to bring us a proposal and we'll take it up in our regular bargaining in the spring." "I know that when these ideas started coming up in the late 1980s, the discipline of anthropology became aghast at the possibility that our notes and our research and our tapes could possibly fall out of our hands, because much of the data we produce is produced under confidentiality," said Tom Taaffe, a graduate student in Anthropology. Taaffe also said that in requiring PIs to store data, the University takes on the responsibility of providing sufficient, appropriate storage space. "The University's ownership under this policy is not about increasing ownership of intellectual property," said Monson. "It's about sound management principles. And the things I mentioned at the beginning of this they're just going to grow. This policy won't make any difference at all to how you operate. But you get one good scientific misconduct case or one good harassment-under-Freedom-of-Information case, and you'll see the virtues of this. Now I'm a member of the union, and I certainly respect their rights, but I honestly don't believe that this constitutes a grab for extra intellectual property." "This policy has been much discussed by members of the Rules Committee, and we even had a meeting with the vice chancellor for Research about it," said Lisa Saunders, associate professor of Economics. "And we tried very hard to understand the needs for sound management practices that the University needs to meet their requirements. And we tried really hard to suggest ways in which the policy might be rewritten to meet some of the concerns of the faculty, not just about intellectual property, but our own needs to manage and store our data in a reasonable way. And a large number of our concerns have gone ignored, even in the amended version of the report." Saunders said there is no mention in the report of which research data are included. "Is every data element I collected over my whole career at UMass now UMass's property?" According to Saunders, some data developed by researchers may serve as the basis for future projects and should be protected as intellectual property. "It would be more useful for me to know in advance who's requesting the data than to find out later the University at the discretion of the research office has granted access to data to someone, and I have no control over what they can do with it," she said. Monson said that without University ownership, "the policy has no teeth." In the end, senators referred the report back to the Rules Committee and the Research Council. A draft of the proposal is available for viewing online (www.umass.edu/senate/Res_Council_Report.pdf). |
