Should Applied Research Funding Go To Startups or Academia?
blog.scienceexchange.com
blog.scienceexchange.com
Adam and I were once on a call with an academic consortium that had received ~$15M in funding from ARAA. The objective of this group was quite similar to what we are doing with our startup. This group reached out to us too see if there was a way we could work together. During the conference call it was Adam and me on our side and at least 10 researchers from institutions all over the US on the other side!
Those were the early days of our startup and we thought that we would be obliterated by them with their vast resources. It turns out that with 1/10th their funding we have done more than 10x of what they did. And they are floundering while we are just warming up.
The last time I checked, the company folded and my lab never got the new features back. Worst of all, the code is now locked away, never to be seen from again. Even the code that I wrote can't be used outside of that original install.
So, I agree that academic centers are usually not very skilled at developing software that can survive, at least the projects that do succeed are generally available to the research community.
Unfortunately, it's next to impossible to get tenure working on such projects, so anyone that is skilled at projects of this scale leave academia pretty quickly.
The real problem is how do you identify particular groups or commercial labs to approach, so that they can complete your work.
Research money is quite risky because you are asking for someone to achieve something that does not yet exist. You have a good probability of running out of money before something comes back to you.
I can't help but feel that this article reads like a combination of sour grapes and a pitch to avoid academic institutions because of a bunch of tired, overgeneralized ideals.
If a team has a track record of delivering, then they usually continue to get the grants. That's how it works, for better or worse. Part of the way you break into research is by joining the good teams before charging off on your own...or publishing something of note. While it has its problems, I think most people would be hard pressed to come up with a completely better approach without its own set of equivalent drawbacks.
For-profit business already have well-established funding channels, namely angel investors and venture capitalists. Government doesn't do a good job of investing in startups (Solyndra?) and should stay out of it.
Back when I was involved with arxiv.org we had 1/8 the budget of some people next door who'd build a huge portal that had essentially no end users. Perhaps we could have done so much more if we'd had more money, but practice shows that academics will eat the money up and deliver very little for it.
One of the worst things about the peer review process at journals is the lag and one-way nature of communication between authors and referees. It is tremendously frustrating to have one referee torpedo the whole process because he/she has interpreted the paper incorrectly. I'd love to see somebody try to replace the traditional referee process with something like an invitation-only forum so that authors and referees can interact in a timely basis with anonymity preserved. Arxiv could do a variation of this by creating a forum open to users who have published papers on the arxiv (just to weed out spammers). This could provide rapid feedback to strengthen papers as well as a place to collect answers to questions from readers.
Cheers!
(1) arXiv.org is amazingly successfully because people use it and love it. However, the low funding of arXiv.org also means that arXiv.org has missed many opportunities. Had we gotten 4x the funding we got, and spent it well, we might have come to dominate several more academic fields and we could have launched some awesome features.
(2) I think we could have solved the problem of "non-scientists" commenting, but there's also the problem that the physics community is very snarky. What if, say, a grad student writing his first paper gets a really nasty comment by one of the luminaries in the field? We didn't want to get involved in all the suffering that would have entailed.
You're totally right about the ineffectiveness of peer review and that was a subject that we talked about a lot. Some service for giving feedback to papers and evaluating their significance could have been a great help. Yet, a serious investigation of this could reveal that many of the assumptions about how science works may be wrong.
For instance, we found that by far, the papers on arXiv.org that are of most enduring interest are review papers. Like the U.S. patent system, scientific publishing fetishizes being the first to do something, not the first to do it right. Similarly, the idea of "reproduction" is core to what people say the scientific method is, but almost no scientific results are reproduced and many or most would not be reproducable if somebody tried.
Remember, despite peer review, the median scientific paper is wrong.
I also agree with your point about reproducibility - it is another passion of mine which I have written about here: http://blog.scienceexchange.com/2012/04/the-need-for-reprodu...
Please first explain why there should be such a thing as "applied research funding".
The buzzword these days for it is "translational" research.