And an internal poll suggests many NRC employees don’t trust their leaders.
Gary Goodyear, Minister of state for science and technology, signaled Tuesday the NRC will shift its focus from basic science towards applied research meant to develop commercial products, boost jobs and spur the economy. He said that while the purpose of science is to push the boundaries of understanding, it also must be used for “social and economic benefit.” Changes to the almost 100-year-old NRC will help fill the need Canadian businesses have for research and development, he said.
Goodyear said the NRC will in future focus on “industrial research, new growth, and business development.”
“If Canada is going to continue to compete internationally, we must do it through new ideas, new products, and opening new markets. In other words, through innovation,” Goodyear said. “The NRC will now focus on the identified research needs of Canadian businesses. It will be customer pull.”
Yet as the federal government’s biggest research institution changes gears, its own records show how sudden and drastic the change is.
In 2010 its scientists published 746 articles in “refereed” science journals.
These are academic journals where scientists announce new discoveries. They are refereed because the journal sends submissions to outside experts to evaluate before publishing.
By 2012 that number had dropped to 200 articles, a decline of 73 per cent.
The number of refereed papers presented at science conferences fell from 301 to 93 in the same period — down 69 per cent.
And the number of other papers presented at conferences dropped from 64 to 11, down 83 per cent.
Meanwhile NRC guidelines confirm that promotion still rests partly on how much a scientist publishes. For instance, they call for 40 publications to become a senior research officer and 100 to qualify as a principal research officer.
The shift to supporting mainly industrial research has been controversial within the organization. Many scientists say their ability to learn dramatic new things is hampered, while NRC president John McDougall says it’s better to leave “basic” research (work without an immediate commercial use) to the universities.
For instance, he has announced that one “flagship” program will be to grow better wheat that will benefit farmers and consumers. It will be more resistant to drought, cold and disease, and produce more wheat per acre. He has set a timeline of seven to eight years for this.
NRC said the best recent example of commercial research was the development of biofuel for commercial jets made entirely from the carinata plant, an oilseed grown on farms.
A test aircraft flew successfully in Ottawa last fall.
McDougall told staff that in 2011 that “history is an anchor that ties us to the past rather than a sail that catches the wind to power us forward.”
And he predicted recently that there would be fewer findings published in science journals, while more would appear in non-refereed industrial publications.
But a new poll of NRC employees doesn’t show much support for the management team.
A website accessible only to NRC employees asks a weekly question, and last week it invited votes on the statement: “Overall, I believe that the leaders of NRC are making the right decisions for the success of the organization.”
Out of the 721 who answered by Friday morning, 43 per cent strongly disagreed and a further 20 per cent disagreed. Meanwhile 15 per cent agreed and two per cent strongly agreed. The rest said they neither agreed nor disagreed.
The organization has approximately 4,000 employees.
NRC spokesman Charles Drouin said the low poll numbers are “not really unexpected.”
“It’s pretty much explainable with the transformation. We haven’t been communicating very much about this transformation internally,” he said. By later in the summer he said people should be more supportive as they understand better where the NRC is headed.
He confirmed that the sharp drop in publishing research was also anticipated as part of a shift toward business-related work.
The president of the Canadian Association of Physicists warned Tuesday that the loss of “basic” research is worrisome for the country.
It’s not good enough to leave this work only to universities, said Gabor Kunstatter of the University of Winnipeg.
“We have tried to argue that NRC’s capacity for basic research should not be lost,” he said. “And that seems to be happening.”
The NRC’s position “at the interface between industry and universities to some extent is what made them valuable,” he said.
He added in an email:
“What will happen to our capacity to make scientific breakthroughs from long-term research that will lead to dramatic improvements in health care, computing, or information security, or to other advances that we can’t imagine today?”
As well, he said Canada risks not having scientific evidence to support public policy, and risks losing Canadian participation in international telescopes, and facilities needed by a wide spectrum of Canadian researchers such as the National Ultrahigh-Field NMR Facility for Solids.
Original Article
Source: ottawacitizen.com
Author: Tom Spears
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