[LINK] Einstein's fridge an example for NICTA?

[Tom Worthington]

At 02:57 PM 12/11/2006, Evan.ARTHUR at Dest.gov.au wrote:
>... Productivity Commission draft report ... 
>http://www.pc.gov.au/study/science/draftreport/index.html.
>Overall the PC's view of the world has much more in common with 
>Brendan's than Tom's. ...

My approach got a little support in the PC report:

"There may be a case for providing universities with some additional 
funding to demonstrate promising technologies so they can be more 
easily transferred to businesses. However, there are several options 
for supporting such transfer that do not involve a new dedicated 
funding stream." 
<http://www.pc.gov.au/study/science/draftreport/keypoints.html>.

The ACS did some of this when we turned our 30 year old research 
journal into JRPIT in 2000 <http://acs.org.au/jrpit/>. "Practice" was 
added to "Research" and I got the editor to put the business 
orientated papers in front of the journal, pushing the scientific 
ones (with equations) to the back.

It was this sort of mild encouragement for commercialization of 
research I had in mind. Not some system where all the research has to 
be self funded and everything is patented. If we can sensitize the 
researchers as to the sort of things needed for commercialization, 
they may be able to spot what might be useful and how to communicate 
their results to business people. Some researcher may decide to make 
the ultimate sacrifice of becoming extremely rich. ;-)

It will be interesting to see how we can help Australian industry in 
a global open access world. As an example the ARC's new policy might 
help, or hinder, Australian business:

>AUSTRALIA has taken a great leap towards research results being 
>freely available to all, supporters of the open access movement say.
>
>The Australian Research Council and the National Health and Medical 
>Research Council - with total annual grants worth more than 
>$1billion - are about to announce their first open access policies. ...

from: ARC sold on open access to research, Bernard Lane, The 
Australian, December 13, 2006 
<http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20917528-12332,00.html>.

ps: Have I set a Link record for provoking the most replies to any one post?



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
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