On February 17th, UC circulated a research data policy proposal for comment. The proposal opened with the statement, “The Regents of the University of California owns all Research Data and Tangible Research Materials.” The claim is a surprising and alarming move in a historical relationship in which the University has, until now, paid scholars to teach, research and write in our capacity as professionals, vesting in us the capacity to act as independent experts in our fields. However, the document rarely refers to faculty in this way. Instead, it consistently references us as “Workforce Members,” implicitly categorizing faculty as researchers for hire by a central administration, rather than as members of a self-governing faculty senate.
Although the bulk of the proposal is dedicated to policies that would in some way clarify how the University should manage this new ownership, our central misgivings concern the basis and potential consequences of this larger claim itself. One key implication would be that the University could then re-use data that it “owns,” effectively dispossessing faculty of the product of their intellectual labor. In addition to the fundamental governance and intellectual property issues raised by the new policy, there is a set of more pragmatic problems generated by the policy related to open access, collaborative research and “human subjects” concerns. The BFA Board submitted a formal comment on the proposal laying out these concerns in more detail on April 7th. The Social Science Division has also registered concerns.
Although the document circulated gives no account of the problem it attempts to solve, it seems to be a response to cases in which faculty who have engaged in University-sponsored research have taken financially valuable data with them upon leaving. For instance, in 2019, UCSD won a lawsuit against USC, for taking important Alzheimer’s research from the campus. This clearly is an important issue. However, surely a solution that operates at the scale of the actual problem would be more appropriate. It should be possible, as the University provides funding for faculty labs or computers or other especially expensive tools and materials, to draw up specific contracts with those researchers, laying out the conditions of that funding. It seems unreasonable to subject every scholar in the system to this new claim of ownership over their creative production, all in order to avoid writing more tailored and no doubt more appropriate contracts for specifically university-sponsored research.
Leslie Salzinger and Sharad Chari, for the Board of the Berkeley Faculty Association.