Faculty Approves Research Guidelines

The Faculty Council last week approved a new set of guidelines prohibiting professors from entering into certain types of exclusive research arrangements with outside parties.

The new measures forbid members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences from conducting research for outside parties unless the materials and results of that research will be made available to the academic community for verification.

The measure, according to members of the council, will primarily effect professors in the biological sciences. Scholars in that field sometimes work for biochemical companies which hold exclusive patents on research materials and can thus effectively bar other scientists from verifying research results.

But the scholarly cost of prohibiting certain research arrangements will be balanced by the benefit of making all materials available for verification, according to Jerry R. Green, Wells professor of political economy and a member of the Committee on Research Policy--which drafted the proposal.

"This gives a researcher who wants to have his work verified a chance to say to the company that if they are going to do the research, they must have it verified," said Green. "There may be isolated cases [in which] a supplier takes away research, but in the vast majority of the cases, it will serve to open the research up."

But Green and other faculty members contacted yesterday said the new restrictions will not have a dramatic effect on the University.

"I don't see it as a significant change, but as a useful articulation of certain guidelines," said Professor of History of Religion and Islamic Studies William A. Graham, a member of the council. "It is trying to articulate guidelines, but I think most of the time they are not needed."

According to council members, the new policy is merely an attempt to make Faculty rules more precise. Prior to the council's action, University research policy was vague and could not be applied to particular circumstances.

"It is an attempt to try to clarify the intent of a policy. What the new formulation does is try to clarify what everyone agrees is dean of the Division of Applied Sciences. "The philosophy was always there. It has been distilled. The general notion we have tried to distill is that it is clearly desirable for research to be available to everyone."

Although acting Dean of the Faculty Henry Rosovsky said the new change was not a major one, he added that it was part of a larger trend towards clarifying research policies at Harvard.

"Maybe 10 years ago, we had few guidelines because operations were small and informal," Rosovsky said in an interview prior to the council decision. "Now things have grown. The government is interested. Gradually we have built up procedures. There are more explicit and formal procedures today which is a good thing."

According to Green, members of the Faculty's Committee on Research Policy said Harvard's new rules will likely be slightly more stringent than those at most research universities.

"We are on the more restrictive side," said Green. "There are universities with more lenient policies."

Although they will affect primarily the work of natural scientists, the new guidelines can extend to the social sciences and the humanites, according to members of the council.

Under the new restrictions, an historian commissioned to do an authorized biography might not be able to take on the project if access to personal papers was limited.

But according to Professor of History William E. Gienapp, authorized biographers are very rarely prohibited from making private papers available to other researchers after work has been completed. "It is not a nonexistent problem, but I don't think it is a constant occurence," said Gienapp.

Because in the social sciences, scholars very rarely try to "reproduce" another's results, the guidelines will be less important.

"The real issue is, in the sciences, the notion of replicability is very important," said Rosovsky. "In the social sciences and humanities, replicability is less difficult to get hold of."

Lan N. Nguyen contributed to the reporting of this story.