Studies on Unrestrained and Commercializable Intellectual Property in Higher Educational Institutions

The work of higher educational institutions depends on its research content and the infusion of knowledge into students in the pursuit of new knowledge is its concomitant aim. These are cooperative features because smarter and better trained students will contribute motivated hard work with significant contributions to research. Understandably, the motivation for research for any faculty member would be to uncover something grandly new, bring it to the attention of the scientific world first and others next and earn accolades, recognition, promotion, and awards. Promotion for outstanding work occupies an important position for a faculty member to be seen as a worthwhile colleague in the department or section within the institution and a worthwhile family member. Not all faculty members can be understood not to be always noble and wishing to reach the highest goals in very honorable and respected ways. Efforts to enhance visibility through shortcuts in terms of number of publications by making them suitably tailored with no substantive conceptual content are possible and cannot be easily argued against unless substantial time passes. The causes for these are many. There will be senior colleagues who have large number of “average” papers accepted for publication in reasonably good journals, the unjustifiable rejection of one’s own papers in not the best of the journals, and petty jealousies that need to be factored into one’s own life to make academic progress in an unblemished manner. Thus, academic life is many times as knotty as public life. The measurable academic output from an institution is a combination of these factors and one might find tracks of these in the variability of indices of performance. Some of these observations are not entirely new. These aspects have been discussed in earlier studies as well. Sonnert,^[1] states “…Scientists have some control over the number of publications they generate from a given amount of research. On the extremes, ‘mass producers’ create a great volume of marginal material and ‘perfectionists’ produce a small number of extremely valuable publications” (Cole and Cole).^[2] The idea of industry-academia interactions has also been a matter of debate and Leydesdorff and Etzkowitz^[3] discuss the idea of academia – industry – government relations as a “triple helix” providing an important catch word for what is perceived as important for healthy growth of the institution and the country. The double helix of government – academia has been in practice for long in institutions of higher learning like IISc very significantly and the academia – industry relationship in a muted way over a time with attempts to enhance this relationship. In more recent times, Malele^[4] has emphasized the importance of socio-economic development as an important component that should figure in the relationships. And also, arguments are advanced in which community engagement experience should be a component to assess a faculty member’s academic promotion in a university. Greater emphasis of this class can perhaps be misused since engaging in socio-economic development relates to public relations and can dilute the true role of scientific creativity.

In view of (a) the appreciation obtained from the literature, (b) the fact that hardly has there been any rigorous study of performance of higher educational institutions vis-à-vis objectives with which such institutions are founded, and (c) Indian Institute of Science has always stood tall in the minds of the people of India and also overseas as a high quality educational institution for higher learning, the present work aims at a study of the academic performance of the institution as revealed through (i) the publication profile of a statistically significant size of the faculty, and (ii) its industrial and societal interactions identified as commercializable intellectual property through the centre for scientific and industrial consultancy. The former is rigorously treated using the publication data available from information in public domain as well those from within the Institute and the latter based on both data and interactions with faculty to determine their motivation to undertake basic research and development connected research. The rest of the paper is arranged in terms of sections involving discussions of the measures of performance, a description of sample source and methodology, journal and their features, analysis of journal publications, IISc and CIP, perceptions on Unrestrained Intellectual Property (UIP) vs CIP and a summary.

Even though academic performance is measured in terms of number of publications, the overall contributions of a faculty member that would involve publications, consultancy, patents, developments of significance, teaching and administrative support would be assessed for their quality. This approach predates the idea of triple helix discussed in ref.^[3] and the idea of socio-economic relevance discussed in ref.^[4] Since quality is not an easy parameter to assess for an institution, it depends on a number of subject experts to provide their confidential assessment and then to base their judgments for promotions. When it concerns frontier research contributions, referees include many with some from overseas and the overall academic and administrative support related aspects are dealt with by the department. Formal communication of promotion or otherwise based on the responses from the experts are made available to the faculty member whose performance is assessed and these reach the rest of the community informally (excepting the chairman of the department). Thus, the number of publications is one measure of performance. As discussed in the earlier section, the word count was considered another valid parameter because some would write long and others short papers. The question of recognition of scientific work would be a parameter of significance. In general, in an academic environment, fellowship of academies was the parameter of significance. Since most institutions of significance pride in technology transfers as well, the output in the form of patents and technology transfer would be another appropriate measure. Since this aspect is not a widely nurtured and understood subject, its role in recognition is many times not even factored. The best way to assess this was to hold one-to-one meetings along with a questionnaire and obtain direct inputs from the faculty on what they thought as their appreciation of the role. This is the approach chosen for the current study.

A total of 102 faculty from IISc was considered for the study. There are five different faculty groups depending on their areas of work. At IISc, there are five divisions – Biological Sciences (BC), Chemical Sciences (CS), Electrical Sciences (ES), Mechanical Sciences (MS) and Physical and Mathematical Sciences (PMS). Each division has under its umbrella several departments. The largest of these divisions is Mechanical Sciences with each of its departments having multiple individual disciplines and the smallest is Physics and Mathematical Sciences. Even though cross division collaborations exist, they are not significant. In fact, efforts are being made to allow cross-division collaboration, but during the period of study, it was weak. Hence the present study is not affected because of this feature.

It was consciously decided to choose as many faculty for each of the divisions as possible to obtain a reasonable statistical measure of the performance. The details of the divisions, the departments and number of faculty considered are set out in Table 1.

The data of these faculty members was obtained with some effort. This was not entirely easy because at the time of this study, there was no central database for this purpose or demand that each faculty member place all his/her publications in an accessible manner on their web page. About 60% was obtained from the web sources. The rest was obtained directly through personal requests and from internet search through the library access. The sample population, as detailed in Table 1, belonged to a heterogeneous group – people having research and teaching experience (post Ph.D.) of 6 – 45 years.

Obtaining the number of publications was not such a difficult task. It was very arduous to determine word count. This is because it was necessary to obtain the number of words per page of each of the journals contained. There were issues of the first and the last page which would be different from the prime textual areas in terms of formatting, which in turn would have bearing on the number of words contained. The first page of the journals contained on average 38% fewer words than the second and subsequent pages. The last page of the research paper contained references in most cases and in few cases acknowledgement and a profile of the author (s). About 85% of the last page of the articles analyzed in this study was less than a quarter page. For the purpose of computing the number of words, only the second or subsequent page is considered. The methodology adopted is to copy the PDF (Portable Document Format) text into a word file and using MS Word count tool. In cases (<15%) where the soft copy of the paper was not available, manual counting was used (admittedly very time consuming). The figures, graphs, tables, photographs, and images used in the research publication have been assigned a number of words based on the space they occupied. The text height and width were measured using scale either in the journal page or print version of PDF of journal article. A custom designed flexible scale containing font sizes in addition to centimeters and inches, was created and used. The magnitude of the effort is to be understood considering more than 900 journals were dissected for the information as above.

The total number of journals in which researchers have published is about 950. The publications in each discipline occur over a much smaller number of journals. Table 2 provides the number of journals in each discipline and its publication pattern. The spread in the disciplines is reflected in the number of journals where the publications of the respective faculty appear. Mechanical sciences have the largest number of journals and physical sciences the smallest.

The last column indicates researchers’ use of mean per capita journals. It can be seen that researchers in Mechanical Sciences discipline have published in large numbers of journals with an average per capita use of 11.3 journals and least usage is by researchers in Physical and Mathematical discipline indicating use of fewer journals for publications and so the per capita journal usage is 6.7.

It is not proper to strictly classify every journal into any particular discipline, as there are many journals, which cover all disciplines of science and technology like Science, Nature, Current Science and others who are quite discipline specific like AIAA Aerospace Journal, Behavior, Biochemistry, Vaccine, J of Electron Spectroscopy and Rel. Phenomena and so on. Hence this classification is based on general parameters; the discipline the author belongs to publishing the work. In the wake of the above facts, the classification is not very rigid in reality. Another phenomenon widely known and accepted is that as the knowledge progresses, the dividing lines between disciplines become very thin. Multi-disciplinary approach to tackle scientific problems, of late, is quite widespread.

Using the methodology mentioned in the previous section, journals used for this study were analyzed. Table 3 summarizes the characteristics of these journals.

The print area range is also large – 25 to 70 square inches with a mean of 54 square inches. More than 50% of the journals are in the range of 56-65 sq. inches.

Perhaps, for reasons of each journal wishing to be unique, their publishers use a special style of presenting the text, one such exclusive feature being the number of columns used. Table 4 classifies the journals analyzed; it can be seen that 71% journals use two columns and contain 360-1820 words/page. The range in the number of words/pages is very large.

The minimum to maximum height of print area in a typical page is 6 to 10.2 inches with a mean of 8.7 inches.

Figure 1 shows the data on the number of journals with words/ pages. Each of the data points has a range of ± 25 on the values indicated. The distribution appears near normal with a wide spread in the words/page from about 400 to 1200. These data are used to obtain the total words that a faculty member wrote in his/ her publications over 10 years.

Figure 1:
The distribution of the number of journals vs. words per page for a total of 902 journals. (original).

As a measure of the performance of the faculty in different disciplines, the data on the number of publications per year averaged over the 10-year period for the faculty is shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2:
The number of publications/years averaged over 10 years of the 102 faculty from the five divisions (original).

It must be remembered that Mechanical and electrical sciences belong to the engineering discipline and the three other basic sciences. The data is very revealing. The different divisions seem to reflect very different tendencies. The lowest performance is in Electrical sciences and the highest in Chemical sciences. The faculty from Chemical sciences publish a much larger number of papers than others. If we keep apart about a dozen faculty with a very high number of publications, most other faculty publish between 2 to 5 papers a year. It is important to examine the faculty with the largest number of publications. For instance, publications of 19/year – a paper every three weeks – may imply that a large content of the papers is about similar (like experimental tools, procedures or mathematical approaches) and the new content does not need intensive thinking or rationalization with findings of literature. It actually implied in specific cases that there is a battery of research students (the fraction of post-doctoral fellows was not large at IISc as the students would look for post-doctoral opportunities overseas) who would write the papers with guidance from senior students and the papers are briefly scrutinized before being cleared by the supervisor for submission. Those, whose publication records showed a 2 to 4 publications per year had between 2 to 4 Ph. D. students.

Discussion with several of the faculty (to be discussed later on intellectual property related aspects) revealed that it would take a couple of months for ideas to crystallize, conflicts in data and calculation aspects resolved and to put together material of significance would be such that publishing four papers of intellectual significance, year after year would be stupendous. It is also possible that a breakthrough in the experimental or computational study might inspire a spate of publications. But this cannot last too long unless repetitive work is performed.

The number of words vs. the papers is set out in Figure 3. While a fair amount of data falls along a linear relationship, implying larger number of papers also meaning a proportional number of words, there are deviations even allowing for scatter in the expectations (covered by the two outer dotted lines), it appears that about 10% faculty publish with lower number of words for every paper they publish. And an exception or two who publish a lot both in terms of number of papers and words. Most of the faculty who publish a larger number of papers with lesser content of words per paper belong to the chemical sciences division – with many chemical compounds to study or synthesize and conduct characterization studies (this could be an over-simplification, but not far from the truth). Most importantly, even in the band of variation the number of words written in a paper varies by a factor of 1.5 to 2.5 in the 20 to 40 papers (for ten years) range. To put this differently, faculty members who write 40 papers in ten years, would have put in 20000 to 40000 words in their papers. If those who write 40000 words could split the contents into different publications (of course, may not always be possible), they would have got nearly twice the number of publications. This is such a wide range that perception of faculty in the department and the senior faculty involved in promotions and awards would get a very different picture depending on the approach chosen for publications (The details of the publications of individual faculty members are set out in the Appendices Table A1 to A5).

Figure 3:
Academic output in terms of number of words vs number of papers by the faculty in various divisions. (original).

The mean parameters are listed in Table 5 for all the divisions. The number of faculty that has more than 25 publications in 10 years (2.5 per year) shows that all in chemical sciences and most in bio sciences have this accomplishment. Electrical sciences division seems to lag behind with mechanical sciences as well as physical and mathematical sciences in a respectable range (75% faculty meet the expectation stated here). The difference in the variation of the number of publications per year over different faculties being such a large number implies that one needs to be extremely cautious in treating the number of publications as an indicator of intellectual productivity of the faculty.

Going further, the number of words per paper is the lowest for physics and mathematical sciences division as well as chemical sciences division. That the largest number of words and words/ paper belongs to the Mechanical sciences division is not also easily explainable. That these are significant averages and show up distinct features implies that these are to be taken valid for what they are. The only factor is that an extraordinary performance of some faculty leads to these aberrations cannot be ruled out.

Indian Institute of Science is a premier institute of higher learning in India that celebrated its centenary in 2009 and has on an average of about 2500 students out of this about 1500 Ph.D. students and rest Masters with an intake of about 700 students per annum. It offers about 400 courses at PG level and 80 courses at research level. IISc has about thirty-five departments and centres in many branches of science and engineering. It produces on average 2000 research publications annually. The set objectives of the Institute are “to provide for advanced instruction and to conduct original investigations in all branches of knowledge as are likely to promote the material and industrial welfare of India”.

In the background of the last statement, much discussion went on in the late sixties and early seventies (IISc docs).^[5] Consequent upon these, the Centre for Scientific and Industrial Consultancy (CSIC) came into being on March 3, 1975 as the industrial window allowing consultancy activities to be undertaken by faculty in a formal way ensuring institutional support. This was the starting point for activities related to CIP.

Initial phase saw a lot of proactive measures to encourage faculty members to undertake consultancy. CSIC successfully dealt with 3800 projects, about 120 projects per year on the average by about 100 faculty in most branches of science, engineering and management from 1975 to 2008. The projects undertaken varied in themes and clientele – individual, proprietary firms to multinational to government agencies, cost ranging from a few thousands to millions and project duration of a few weeks to a few years. Those of a few weeks refer to an important calculation for immediate use or suggestions for an early resolution of a field problem. Projects operating from 1 to 2 years are about product development and associated performance testing. There have been consultancy projects involving periodic institutional advice lasting several years. A few examples of successful projects are cited here.

There was a problem solving situation that got posed to CSIC in 1984, when it was reported that there was a heavy landslide due to incessant monsoon rains and the penstock pipe of a major hydroelectric power station (Sharavathi power station, Karnataka producing a thousand MWe under full discharge conditions) had been damaged and the secretary to a relevant department of the Government of Karnataka who had close links with several faculty at IISc reached out to Chairman, CSIC soon after and enquired if IISc would help out in the restoration of the penstock indicating a timeline. The point was that the reputation of IISc would be at stake if IISc failed and so the Chairman wanted the responsibility to be distributed so that when a crisis situation arose inputs from many could be obtained. A team of eight people from four departments were put together to be the consultants. A step-by- step procedure was evolved to understand the precise technical issues and ways of overcoming. The problem was resolved after about eight months within the timeline provided to them. This was one of the problems that got solved due to the participation of faculty from several departments.

Two groups have been active in substantive industry relevant projects. One from the cryogenic center of the physics department where a special cryo-oxygen container as a breathing apparatus for the indigenous light combat aircraft was built to some critical specifications.

Another group engaged in biomass gasification for power generation developed the technologies for biomass based distributed power generation from 5 to 1000 kWe and the technologies were transferred to several private industries both in India and overseas bringing larger revenues in terms of first-time fees and royalties over a fifteen-year period. In the early stages, these efforts were converted into a separate operation under a Society under the Institute for the specific purpose to allow greater freedom for its faculty participants to operate all the transactions under the overall guidance of a board for which the IISc director was the Chairman. There were some other spin offs that did not start right, but allowed to grow separately outside the ambit of IISc.

It was found that the perceptions of CIP-Commercializable Intellectual Property was somewhat alien to IISc culture of fundamental research and questions of whether we should even be engaged in it were debated hotly. A questionnaire-based on interview was undertaken with a substantial fraction of the faculty at IISc as also from University of Mysore and University of Agricultural Sciences, Bangalore (Narahari).^[6] The broad summary is that the senior academic management does not consider these aspects to be as important and, in some cases, not even needed. Even though many statements are made about the relevance in public forums, the approaches used in promotion and owning up technology development and outstanding consultancy is very weak. The expectation of the senior management is that such consultancy and technology development even if it is science based is not on par with journal publications. A paper in Nature or Science is more widely positively discussed across the campus and science-based technology development rarely figures in the discussions. One of the reasons is that the colonial hangover is not overcome. Technology development can largely be appreciated only within the country, whereas scientific publications have international reach that allows for international recognition and personal visibility, features that are widely perceived as a worthwhile approach. The institutional culture therefore is seriously amiss on these aspects. Though over time, there have been changes, but the senior management does not feel strong enough to help create a change in a substantive manner, because these questions are not even debated formally. The Governments may want the change, but much larger scale internal debates are needed to ensure ownership of the culture both by individual academics and the institution because it is important that front ranking science is not sacrificed due to induction of new ideas of industrially and socially relevant research and development. Such debates did not take place during the period of this study and do not seem to have taken place afterwards either.

This paper has discussed the aspects related to intellectual property of Indian Institute of Science – via publications (unrestrained) and science-based consultancy/technology development. Widely held view on the number of publications is shown to be a weak measure of intellectual performance of faculty. Institutional efforts at showcasing outstanding science-based consultancy and technology development are almost absent or very weak in IISc and perhaps true in many other institutions. Unless true intellectualism is respected whether it appears as scientific publication or science-based consultancy, the progress of the institutions of higher learning becoming leading lights for societal change will be difficult to achieve.