The Daily Hampshire Gazette has been trying to get its hands on all the agreements UMass Amherst signs with private businesses to conduct many millions of dollars in sponsored research.
The public documents released to the paper so far show the research benefits the university's bottom line — while also raising questions of ethics and conflicts of interest.
Gazette reporter Dusty Christensen explains that this public-private research is not a new thing.
Dusty Christensen: Yes, there's always been this balance between private funding, public funding. In terms of numbers, we looked at the last 10 years and there's been a steady flow of money from private industry into funding research at the university. It was at 7% of all research dollars awarded in fiscal year 2019. That was kind of steady over the last 10 years.
These are the conversations and issues that have been raised over the decades by universities and by faculty and others. We cite in the piece some recommendations from the American Association of University Professors, or AAUP. They AAUP was an organization founded in 1915, largely as a response to corporate influence on academic freedom. So these kinds of tensions and questions have been asked for decades at American institutions of higher learning.
Carrie Healy, NEPM: So your public records request was made and you got back some information, but largely what did it look like?
If you look at these documents, they're filled with black bars, redactions, strikethroughs in the agreements. Some of these things look like we received a document from the CIA. I mean, it's entirely blacked out. And that is because there is that exemption to the state public records law that prevents us as the public from knowing what sort of terms have been agreed to, and specifically when it comes to what kind of licensing deals they're handing out.
I should also note that the university originally wanted to charge us hundreds of dollars in order to compile and redact these documents. We were fortunate enough to know a lot about the state's public records law, and we knew that the university had responded to our request after 10 business days. And if you respond to a public records request after 10 business days, you're not allowed to charge a fee. So had the university responded earlier to our request, we may have never seen these documents.
OK, I should disclose, the university does hold the radio license for WFCR. With that said, this is a time when funding for higher education is tight. So what's wrong with accepting private corporate funding for research?
I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with accepting private money to do research. I think the question always comes down to the fine details. What sort of conditions are you agreeing to when you accept that money? Public funding, private funding — they all come with conditions. And I think that it's incumbent upon all of us to look at what those conditions are in order to make a fair assessment of whether those conditions are in the public interest or not. Because, of course, as a public university, that is the University of Massachusetts' mission is to do research that is in the public interest.
So some of those questions for private industry are included. What sort of licensing terms have you agreed to with a private company? Specifically what kind of research are you agreeing to do with them? What kind of restrictions on publication or on transparency are you agreeing to in order to get that funding from private companies? You know, unfortunately, there are some gaps in our knowledge here about what sort of terms the university has agreed to with private companies. And, therefore, we're not able to fully assess the benefit of those terms and whether they outweigh the costs.
Do you get any sense as to what happens to royalties and intellectual property with some of these companies and not with others?
We really don't have as much knowledge as we need to make determinations about that, because so much of the information about royalties is redacted. We do know that, with a lot of these companies, the university has agreed to — for example — offer the opportunity for that company to get an exclusive license on patentable inventions. For example, with IBM, the university grants the company an option to negotiate a license to exclusively commercialize any UMass inventions or joint inventions between the two parties on commercially reasonable terms and conditions. Those sort of agreements are kind of similar in other with other companies, like PepsiCo.
But in terms of specifics, all that information is redacted because the university is claiming that that's proprietary information of these companies, and that's the kind of information they're allowed to redact under state law.
