Abstract
The viability of modern open science norms and practices depends on public disclosure of new knowledge, methods, and materials. However, increasing industry funding of research can restrict the dissemination of results and materials. We show, through a survey sample of 837 German scientists in life sciences, natural sciences, engineering, and social sciences, that scientists who receive industry funding are twice as likely to deny requests for research inputs as those who do not. Receiving external funding in general does not affect denying others access. Scientists who receive external funding of any kind are, however, 50 % more likely to be denied access to research materials by others, but this is not affected by being funded specifically by industry.
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Notes
These institutes are major actors in German science, and have many branches across disciplines. For example, the Fraunhofer society has 17,000 employees in 59 institutes. The other science organizations are of comparable size. It is common for German university professors to head research groups at these institutes.
The large discrepancy here is caused in part by many researchers filling in only few questions. Only 1,400 scientists considered all questions in the survey. As these still had some item non-response, we had to exclude part of the sample.
Some readers might worry that these responses are affected by social desirability bias. While we cannot formally test for this, we can offer some reassurance in the observation that the reported shares of being denied access and denying access are similar to those found by Walsh et al. (2007) in the context of material requests of biomedical scientists. They found shares of 17 and 7 % for respectively the share of scientists being denied ones latest request for materials and the average share of requests for materials made my other academics that the scientist did not fulfill.
All these variables have been collected in the survey. In order to check the reliability of the information provided in the survey, we also gathered the publication and patent data from external databases (the ISI Web of Science and the PATSTAT patent database). Although the numbers did not match exactly, the results do not depend on the source of the data (survey vs. publication/patent databases). This test of data reliability makes us confident that also the other variables are quite accurately reported by the scientists. Note that the results reported below are obtained by using the externally collected patent and publication data.
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The authors thank John Walsh for valuable comments.
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Czarnitzki, D., Grimpe, C. & Pellens, M. Access to research inputs: open science versus the entrepreneurial university. J Technol Transf 40, 1050–1063 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-015-9392-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-015-9392-0