[rauhallinen]

During my time as a research assistant / grad student there was a remarkable shift in the atmosphere. It started with massive layoffs of research staff, linked to the more general savings of our government.

More esoteric professors were replaced with more efficient manuscript machines submitting manuscripts to more prestigious journals. Soon after the layoffs, the university's innovation and commercialization services became extremely active. Recurring events at lecture rooms where we were blasted on how our work is IP of the university, how the university takes only 50% cut if something works, how cool is it to be a researcher who commercializes ideas in comparison to being one those dusty farts in the science cave studying one protein or butterfly for their entire life.

Being a believer and practitioner of open source, I once asked how does this all this apply to computational science. Basically all algorithms and tools should be passed through them to see if they have commercial potential - if no, we can go ahead. Found it appalling and interfering with my intellectual freedom, one of the many events that made me pursue life outside the academia.

[Jhsto]

Had a similar experience with Oxbridge this year. They admitted me to a PhD program and asked me to pay the fees (which I was fine with, I had my own funding source), but they also wanted 50-100% of the IPR. Whether it is 50% or 100% depends on their consideration whether they see that the funding source has contributed to the creation of the IP. If not, Oxbridge owns the IP, and you are given rights to license your own work from the university.

Some are saying to me it is not as bad as it sounds, and that I should go because Oxbridge leads to a better life. But some agree with me on the fact that it creates very bad incentives for good research. I also asked some current PhD students what they think about it, and they told me they never even thought about who owns their work. I checked some other universities which declared that any IPR is always owned by the student, not the university. But, most seem to declare that the work is owned at least in part by the funding source, which seems fair to me.

A one commentor was very strong in their opinion that most universities and especially the UK are currently committing an intellectual suicide with how they treat their researchers.

[marcus_holmes]

A friend of mine was refused permission to use their own research in their startup. It wasn't even about the amount of the licence fee, it was a straightforward "if you start a business, you'll be doing less research for us. Let someone else licence your research and start the business, and you carry on doing more research".

Luckily they managed to avoid the specific IP in the papers that the university owned, and start the startup anyway. It has gone on to be a successful business.

Obviously, the university lost out in every conceivable way from this scenario. Literally any other course of action would have given them a better result. Play stupid games, etc.

edit: this was Australia btw

[hlandau]

Interestingly the fallout of this practice isn't just academic. Colin Percival, who is the author of Tarsnap and who sometimes posts here, is also the author of bsdiff, an efficient binary delta patching algorithm. His website notes he implemented a superior version of this algorithm for his 2006 Oxford PhD thesis. I seem to recall him mentioning years ago that the IP for this superior version belonged to Oxford, and how he hoped they would at some point give him permission to release the code for it. As far as I'm aware nothing has been heard since, though maybe I missed something.

[austinjp]

In my reading [0,1] Cambridge is more lenient than Oxford about intellectual property. I've heard that Cambridge is one of the more lenient universities in the UK regarding IP, although I don't have experience or data to back that up.

Your university will (should!) provide talks or contact with their IP department, spin-out office, etc. You should be able to ask pertinent questions of them in confidence. Make a contact there, and ask for an off-the-record conversation, they should be amenable.

In my limited experience, universities are averse to some monetisation approaches that are frequently used in computing businesses, for example open-sourcing the code and monetising a service that deploys/supports it. (I'm aware of difficulties with this model, just using it as an example.) Instead, they are far more familiar with approaches such as patenting a new algorithm and selling enterprise licenses.

If you're planning a business model that the university would not be interested in, you should be able to get them to confirm a lack of interest. This leaves you with the issue of whether you've developed something patentable. I've never been in that position so I wouldn't know, but I'm curious about how a university would respond to a student open-sourcing every piece of code they develop as they go. Academically this seems a great thing to do, but universities are commercial enterprises, and they might take a dim view.

The usual "I am not a lawyer" caveat applies to everything I've written here. I'd also strongly advise against any action that is likely to see you go up against a university's legal department, because they'd crush you :)

[0] https://www.cambridgestudents.cam.ac.uk/your-course/examinat...

[1] https://governance.admin.ox.ac.uk/legislation/statute-xvi-pr... and https://governance.admin.ox.ac.uk/legislation/council-regula...

[michaelt]

I've got some sympathy for this in the case of countries other than the US and China.

After all, if Stanford does research funded by the US taxpayer, develops a new ML technology and gives it away for free, Google/Facebook will make a bunch of money from it, which they'll pay US taxes on.

But if École Polytechnique does research funded by the French taxpayer, develops a new ML technology and gives it away for free? Google/Facebook will make a bunch of money from it, which they'll pay US taxes on - while the French economy will see a much smaller upside.

[andi999]

It depends a bit on the subject, but most IP generated by grad students is not worth much. Of course if you specialize in something where you see the commercial possibility from the beginning and aim to do that to start your company:ok, consider this things, otherwise don't bother.

[ezoe]

Pay to research and pay to use the fruits of your research? What kind of shameless parasite are they?

[majormajor]

> But, most seem to declare that the work is owned at least in part by the funding source, which seems fair to me.

There's a dark side here - and the common refrain of "if paid for with public money, it should be in the public domain" - of normalizing the power of capital holders compared to the people doing the work. Most of the time, that idea is going to have bad public outcomes, so I don't like playing into it with regard to journals and research publications.

[dingo454]

I started to work as a staff member of a local research center mostly doing foundational research (genetics, life sciences), publicly founded so no conflict of interests. At some point, the founding body (the local administration) decided that general research wasn't cool anymore, and was thought to be a waste of money. They should only found "targeted research", an idea which sounds good in theory, but in practice is a sure way to destroy research at it's core. The first result is that any researcher that wasn't working on something mandated from above had either to shift (destroying his work) or leave. New positions would only be open to work on targeted projects.

The net result was a massive loss of bright researchers, massive churn and the death of pretty much any promising research endeavor (it's hard to do great research on a 2 years contract already, but doing so without infrastructure...).

The administration also started to push aggressively for this idea that we should try to apply for patents in anything that seems even vaguely applicable, and in order to keep the financing going the center had to sign a contract that "guarantees an increased in throughput of 2% every year", where the throughput is measured in pubblications. Again, this requires no explanation for whoever has worked in research, but for the others: it's impossible: it just promotes lower and lower-quality of output in order to meet the criteria, until it will bust.

This also gives an idea how the center and the local administration fail to understand how research work on a basic principle.

The local group has started to apply aggressively for more and more EU grants (which are the only one that can provide vaguely sustainable research), which in turn resulted in staff doing less research and much more grant writing. We now have staff whose purpose is doing just that.

Academia has a lot of problems, but founding seems to be one of the major ones. Without stable founding this is what you get: aggressive push to make money, and not to make great research.

[mschuster91]

> Academia has a lot of problems, but founding seems to be one of the major ones. Without stable founding this is what you get: aggressive push to make money, and not to make great research.

It is closely related to a shift in the definition of "what purpose should academia serve?"

Basically, old-school academia had the government pay a lot of money to universities to do general research and educate students to be researchers, and then the military paid more money for research that could be usable for military purposes (encryption, rocketry, nuclear). Training of new employees was paid for by the companies themselves (e.g. apprenticeships).

Nowadays, governments have massively cut general research budgets (leaving universities and research to the mercy of grantors aka the free market), the military is running its own show (aka the MIC sucks in enormous amounts of money and puts it into private coffers), and companies have outsourced training and vetting of new employees to universities and the payment for all of that to the students in form of student loans, which means that universities are no longer primarily a place of research but of schooling.

It's a real disgrace what happened over the last decades, and the Western world will pay badly for this since China does not follow this turbo-capitalist ideology.

[musicale]

I believe some universities make exceptions for open source projects, which seems fair. Basically if you want to give something away then you can, though the university will still own the copyright. I'm not 100% sure how patents work at such institutions, but I believe they can potentially be licensed for free to open source projects and their derivatives (e.g. they won't demand that Apple pay royalties if they use your open source software in an iPhone, as long as they abide by the open source license terms.)

If you want to make it closed source/proprietary and sell it, then the university wants license fees (but you get a cut of those fees, so it's sort of a kickback scheme, but the university picks the fee and there is a set percentage that you get.)

[ok123456]

Usually you have to generate several million dollars in revenue before you see a red cent of those 'kickbacks'. How many times do you honestly think that's going to happen when the paper-circuit rewards the "least publishable unit".

[Loughla]

Academia being viewed as a profit center and 'jobs skills' training center is just killing my spirit. Those dusty old PhD's who get to study one species of butterfly for decades are important because of the knowledge they create, not the jobs they create.

It's super frustrating to work in higher education right now because the focus of every student is 'what job can this get me'.

Maybe I'm just old. Maybe I'm just burnt out. Who knows.

[wly_cdgr]

I sympathize, but if your students stop focusing on that, how do you propose they pay rent after graduation? Working retail? Bartending? Commuting ten hours a week to adjunct at three local community colleges? None of those options exactly leave a lot of time or energy for fundamental research

You can't just handwaive or long-sigh this away...you have to have concrete, realistic, and actionable answers to these questions....otherwise you are literally just complaining about children wanting to survive

[lovelyviking]

>Maybe I'm just old. Maybe I'm just burnt out. Who knows.

or may be some just have lost their sight about what is really important and why academia exists in the first place.

[corobo]

> Basically all algorithms and tools should be passed through them to see if they have commercial potential

That's actually disgusting.. They're supposed to be teaching you, not using you for free labour. They got their cut when you paid for the course..

[academonia]

Post-graduate education is kind of a raw deal for people with undergrad degrees in computational fields. It might actually be worse than "free labor", if you consider the alternative of going to work after your first degree.

In the US, you're looking at paying $20-50k/year, and while most students will get tuition waivers and small stipends, those often disappear if you do any contracting or work on the side to supplement your meager income.

Meanwhile, $100-150k is a reasonable starting total comp right out of school, especially after the recent rash of inflation. And a good worker can realistically double that in the 4-6 years that it would take to get a PhD.

So the opportunity cost is staggering, but wait - there's more. The job market for tech positions has been very hot for the past decade, and the global economy is on the verge of a rebound. If you want to learn about a specific field like ML or aerospace, you can just get a job in that field. Kids graduating today have the option of learning from talented and driven people while earning a reasonable salary.

Research certainly has its place; most of the work that we do is based off of concepts that were pioneered decades ago. But from the perspective of a prospective student in the 2020s, it's a hard sell.

Especially since the current advisor/advisee relationship is rife with perverse incentives. This whole wall of text assumes the best case scenario, where you don't end up in a toxic lab.

[caddemon]

Almost anybody in a position to develop something worthwhile from their research wasn't paying tuition and was probably getting a stipend. But still the students (and any pre-professor researchers) are vastly underpaid for what their skillset brings and for the hours they typically work. The benefit was supposed to be intellectual freedom...

[katten]

In Sweden at 2000, there were a couple of students that made a software to Volvo that could detect if the driver was tired. This driver alert system was the first in the world.

Both students were not employees of Volvo, but still forced to register the system to Volvos internal system for innovation and got 122 000 SEK (15 k $).

2014 they got help from Swedish engineers for a lawsuit towards Volvo cars about 8,7 million sek/student (around 1 million $) for the system (about 3% of the worth of the sales system). Now the lawsuit was drawn back and they did meet on a secret sum from the company and both are today employees of Volvo.

With that said, from what I can see the Academia/Chalmers did not try to take any % of the cut.

Link to the article: https://www.gp.se/ekonomi/volvo-g%C3%B6r-upp-om-miljontvist-...

Link to Swedish engineers: https://www.sverigesingenjorer.se

[cycomanic]

Chalmers does not even retain IP from employees, much less students. The case with the students and Volvo was because they were doing a masters thesis at Volvo and Volvo was trying to claim that all IP developed during that belonged to them. However in Europe such agreements are likely invalid, because an agreement always has to be beneficial to both sides, in this case to give up your IP you have to be paid.

It's quite funny that so many here are claiming universities are claiming student IP, but one of the main cases we find is of a company trying to claim IP without paying.

[HotHotLava]

Do computer science grad students in the US commonly apply for patents on top of writing papers, etc.?

I'm just wondering where the patents in this pool are coming from, I assume the administrators are not going through the research papers and file new patents on the researchers' behalf?

[unishark]

> I'm just wondering where the patents in this pool are coming from, I assume the administrators are not going through the research papers and file new patents on the researchers' behalf?

Your assumption is correct in my experience. Despite the thread starter's somewhat unusual take, it's more of a system based on rewarding inventors with a cut of license fees to incentivize them to submit invention disclosures. Then the school's IP office determines if it wants to pursue a patent on the invention disclosure or not. And open source projects are often part of the grant itself, especially in fields like CS and statistics, so a professor could specifically choose to produce them.

On the other hand though, if a grad student's goal is to take their school project and sell it themselves somehow subsequently, the school might actually own the rights. So this might cause problems at some point with getting funding.

[dmurray]

The university tells them to apply for patents if they can, and provides some of the bureaucracy to make that process easier. In the same way that the university - who is their employer, after all - tells them to publish papers, TA classes, etc. Also, it looks good on your resume. A tenured professor may have the academic freedom to ignore these incentives, but a grad student or junior academic needs all the help they can get.

[twphysicsphd99]

I saw this shift as well.

Project ownership was part of the reason I left acadamia.

I conceived, carried out, and kept 2 projects funded over 6 years that ended up in nature and science. I was elated by the pubs. A few months later a colleague I worked with asked me why I wasn't in the patents and I though, what patents? My advisor took out patents on the ideas and cited the papers in the patents without my knowledge. I didn't argue for the sake of leaving with a phd and the probability that those patents would yield financial benefit.

The whole thing left me disillusioned with acadamia...I'm much happier in industry.

[Gatsky]

It's easy to get upset about all this. Things happen in cycles though. Academia is currently in a lull due to poor incentives, oversupply of research staff arising from the massive growth of universities and the democratisation of higher education, and the general devaluation of experts and technical skills. I also see that in certain foundational areas privately funded research is outperforming academia, sometimes by silly margins (eg Deepmind's protein folding work, Google and quantum computing). The protein folding is a good example of why - Deepmind had something like 10+ senior researchers working on the project, whereas academia has overworked flustered PIs who do admin mainly and a few students starting from scratch each year. This discrepancy can only exist because academia doesn't really care a lot about actual progress. Another interesting phenomenon lately has been the total deluge of deep learning papers. Once the cat was out of the bag, there was a literal explosion of research output in a very short time. One can only conclude that there are a lot academics sitting around looking for the next big thing (rather than working to create it). This is a bit cynical perhaps. There is still progress being made, but as others have noted, it definitely seems to be slowing overall.

I think actually we haven't seen the worst of it. My theory is that the rapidly ageing demographics of the world, which it is important to note is totally unprecedented, will have profound impacts on research and life in general. Mostly, it will be less interest in and funding for research. The cost of caring for the elderly is part of it (see where government revenue goes in more socialist countries, or observe the huge pension liabilities coupled with increasing life span in the USA and some of Europe). But there could be less tangible factors, like the willingness of a more elderly society to support research which will only bear fruit long after many of them are dead. This is understandable. Society will fund as much research as it sees fit. It is hard to make an actual moral argument for funding the kind of extremely expensive, highly technical and incremental pursuit that science has become.

[cycomanic]

I want to just add that most of the current "leading research in ML" at Google et al would not be possible without the years of foundational research conducted primarily at universities before the recent (3rd?) ML hype. Also pretty much all the Google researchers were hired away from universities I believe. That is the thing, industry hardly ever does high risk research that might only pay dividends in a decade or more.

[Al-Khwarizmi]

It's somewhat ironic that because of academia being increasingly managed like industry, you ended up (presumably) in industry.

(Not criticizing, it can perfectly make sense - if you're going to be subject to all that capitalistic crap anyway, you might as well take the higher salary as well. Just pointing out the inherent irony in the situation).

[ptero]

Academia is managed "somewhat" like industry, but only in parts. This can combine the worst of both worlds: captive employees (tenure tracks), large incompetent bureaucracy trying to do business but not skilled or pruned to do it effectively, long hours, lower salaries, etc.

[pacman2]

"only 50% cut if something works,"

This is still very generous. I know salaries are very low for PhD students but it is still a generous offer. I think my US university was 1/3 Uni, 1/3 Prof, 1/3 PhDs. They even handed stocks to a Post-doc with a 6 figure sum.

In an company you may get nothing or very very little.

Wiki: "In United States, however, an employee may have to sign over the rights to an invention without any special compensation. Germany has a law on employees' inventions providing strict rules concerning the transfer of rights to an invention to the employer. It also prescribes mandatory compensation of employees for inventions they make."

What is worse, that in some countries this also covers invention, unrelated to your field of employment. Wage-slave I guess.

[nomoreplease]

That would frustrate me as well! Did they retaliate against anyone for open source? Do you mind if I ask if you went to a public or private university? In the US?

[temporallobe]

This is one tiny iota of an example, but imagine if an algorithm like the Fisher-Yates Shuffle was developed in an academic setting and became IP to be commercialized.

[peter_retief]

This is not just the US.

[andrepd]

UK?