Openness and comercialisation:
How the two can work together?

Five steps to ensure FAIR, GDPR and IPR
Marlon Domingus, Erasmus University Rotterdam

Case based steps to achieve a controlled approach to design and do public private research projects, and assessing which work packages are suitable for FAIR data outputs, respecting IPR, compliant with GDPR. On privacy by design, fit for purpose risk assessment and the importance of de-identification and synthetic data.

Does Humankind need Persuasion Bots?
Tiberius Ignat, Scientific Knowledge Services

This breakout session will discuss the ethics of data reuse by machines and what is needed from industry and research organisations to improve the relationship Man-Machine.

The format of this breakout will be:

unconference for 20 minutes
1-minute reactions for 25 minutes
TBD: reconvene the unconference or further 15 minutes reactions
If this breakout is accepted, the author will do the diligence to invite at least a non-human to join the breakout.

Following his work as a member of the organising committee of the Sorbonne Declaration for Research Data Rights, the author is looking to stimulate the international community to define what rights machines have to use the research data.

There are growing concerns that non-human persuators are harder to be distinguished from humans (1) (2) while they became masters of persuasion (3). Non-human persuators are common contributors to modern business strategies. There’s no better time to defining what rights they should have.

(1) https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256-019-0113-5

(2)https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/11/191112113952.htm

(3) https://www.forbes.com/sites/carminegallo/2019/01/13/ibms-ai-machine-makes-a-convincing-case-that-its-mastering-the-human-art-of-persuasion/

“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” Eleanor Roosevelt

Paula Martinez Lavanchy, TU Delft

Within the project ‘FAIR data and industry collaborations’ of the CESAER Task force Open Science and Task force Innovation a set of interviews have been run with researchers and industry representatives who are part of academia-industry projects under different funding schemes. The results of this project will be published in a CESAER paper in 2021.

In this breakout session of approximately 60 min, we would like to share some of the preliminary results of the project, but more importantly to gather additional information/perspectives that could help us complement the results obtained through the interviews. In an interactive session we would like to engage with the different stakeholders of the conference to investigate if there is a common ground or basic principles that could help implement FAIR data principles and advance towards Open Science within academia-industry collaborations.

The session will use Mentimeter as a tool to engage with the participants, both to gather aggregated views, and to highlight areas for open discussion. The participants in the session should be prepared to bring and share their opinions around FAIR data and Open Science within industry – academia collaborations. We welcome all points of views on the topic, the idea is to have an open (and respectful) debate.

Patents at the interface of openness and commercialisation
Kristin Jirka, RWTH AAchen University

How to protect scientific research results and innovative technical solutions for commercial exploitation?

Patent protection is a common and proven method for technical solutions. The commitments of the patent system like publication delay of patent applications and restrictions in commercial use on the one hand, and open science or open innovation as transparent approaches on the other hand seem to be contradictory aspects. However, 18 months after patent application, patent documents are published and the content is disclosed to the public. Patent literature is a unique information source in terms of novelty, inventiveness and industrial applicability. In some technical fields state-of the art-information that can be found in patents is not available anywhere else in comparable detail. Thus, patent literature is a valuable source of inspiration for R&D in accelerating the innovation circle. Regarding document access, there are no copyright restrictions and free access search tools as well as commercial licence databases.

During the breakout session, the characteristics of the patent system and the potential of patent document search for fostering technology transfer are outlined. The information services of patent libraries (PATLIB centres) will also be treated. As information professionals at an university-based patent library we would like to discuss your experiences concerning the topic and PATLIB centres as well.

Lightning talks
chaired by Yasemin Türkyilmaz-van der Velden

Lightning talk 1 – Matching offer and demand of technological innovation: the knowledge-share case
by Shiva Loccisano

Knowledge Share (KS) was launched in 2019 with the combined efforts of The Polytechnic of Turin, NETVAL (Network for Valorisation of Research), Ministry of Economic Development and the Italian Patent Office. It is the “meeting point” for academia and companies; where the universities and research bodies get the opportunity to showcase their technologies to interested industrial partners, allowing their discoveries to progress into commercial products and services. Currently, KS hosts more than 1,200 technologies and works shoulder to shoulder with 550 R&D companies. To date we have seen an excess of 60 collaborations deals established between universities and companies, with approximately 2,700 visitors interacting with the platform in a given month.

Lightning Talk 2 – How to spot the link between openness and commercialisation from the research support service at the institutional library
by Pablo de Castro

As part of their work on areas like the monthly checking for compliance with manuscript deposit Open Access policies or the payment of Open Access publishing fees on behalf of researchers, research support services at the library implementing Open Access often get to process a large fraction of the institutional research output. This presentation argues that by getting to know the work carried out by the various researchers and research groups via its publications, plus having a privileged view on the funded projects awarded to specific PIs, proactive members of this research support team may well be able to both identify and support activities aimed at the commercialisation of the research conducted by these authors. A few useful strategies for this purpose will be mentioned such as – among others – holding a permanent dialogue with the institutional corporate comms team to highlight specific publications to them for press releases and interviews with authors. Awareness of the approach to commercialisation taken by other research teams within the institution may also help suggest possible best practice case studies to researchers in the framework of the wider conversation held with them on Open Access funding and appropriate management of research data.

Lightning talk 3 – IP Management in EU’s R&D framework – eg. Horizon 2020
by Juan Luis Rodrigues

In a knowledge-based economy, intellectual property become the trading currency for the generation of new business opportunities, including further research and the development of commercial products and services. An intellectual property “right” makes a tangible out of an intangible, which can be sold, licenced or used as (post-project) financing leverage. It is in any case, an “intellectual asset”. For instance, a more efficient configuration of an industrial process might refer to several intellectual property rights, such as utility patents, industrial designs, trade secrets (Know-How), copyrights and even trademarks, which can be monetized just like any tangible assets. The H2020 research and innovation funding programme imposes several obligations on its beneficiaries concerning transparent management of intellectual property and the development of exploitation and disseminations plans in order to ensure “use of results” after the project completion. Such obligations aim to secure the value of intellectual property generated through the project implementation as well as to force the beneficiaries to find business opportunities to exploit the value of their results. The innovation potential of a project takes the wider business opportunity aspects into consideration and contributes to creating a greater impact of the project. In order words, the project impact depends on the subsequent use of the results. The project business model and subsequent use of results already needs to elaborated and described in the proposal phase of an H2020 project.

Lightning talk 4 – Collaboration in research? Trust is not enough.
by Jacquelijn Ringersma

Scientific research is increasingly being conducted in collaborative partnerships that transcend national and institutional boundaries. As a result of this development, collaborative partnerships are getting increasingly large and complex. Project partners need access to each other’s research data and resources. This is not always simple in practice, however, due to incompatible data sharing requirements and guidelines from the various institutions, participating private partners and/or funding organisations. Legal and technical barriers may emerge, particularly with regard to confidential data or intellectual property. The increasing requirements that are being imposed on research and research data can result in barriers in the absence of proper coordination of rules and guidelines concerning data collaboration. Mutual trust amongst partners alone is not sufficient for collaboration in research projects and data sharing. The conditions under which the partners will share data and other resources must be agreed in advance. Trust alone is not enough.