Open Access News

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Friday, June 16, 2006

Australian government report on knowledge transfer and access

Australia's Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) has issued a new report, Knowledge Transfer and Australian Universities And Publicly Funded Research Agencies (dated March 2006 but apparently not released until June). Excerpt:

The Government’s 2004 Backing Australia’s Ability package included the proposal to develop an Accessibility Framework to improve access to research information, outputs and infrastructure. The Government is keen to ensure that, through the establishment and linkage of electronic digital repositories, national scholarly output and research data derived from Australian Government funding will be available to researchers and the wider community....To date, the Government has provided $33.7 million in funding from the Systematic Infrastructure Initiative (SII) for projects to build the technical information infrastructure to support the creation, dissemination of and access to knowledge, the use of digital assets and their management. These projects have been recommended to the Minister by the Australian Research Information Infrastructure Committee (ARIIC). Four of these projects are working on the development of open access institutional repositories....

Enhanced open access approaches will certainly facilitate the sharing of knowledge between researchers and will provide the possibility of greater access for non-academic users of knowledge. Our desktop research, however, suggests that effective knowledge transfer usually requires the intervention of knowledge intermediaries who are able to translate and contextualise academic knowledge to make it ‘useable’ by non-academic communities....

While it is appropriate for public policy to ensure that the return on public investment in research and higher education is realised through effective knowledge transfer, there are also acknowledged tensions between the push to commercialise knowledge generated through publicly funded research and the increasing emphasis being given to open access and open innovation. It was argued by some stakeholders consulted for this project that the current public policy emphasis on research commercialisation encourages institutions to place a narrow interpretation on what constitutes knowledge transfer, and that knowledge was at risk of being ‘locked away’ rather than transferred for wider application....Public policy needs to walk a fine line between creating incentives for exploiting knowledge with potential commercial value and facilitating the wide uptake of knowledge for national benefit.