It's time for a register of interests for science academics

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/apr/10/register-of-interests-science-academics



Francis Collins, director of the US National Institutes of Health, has called for compulsory online registers of researchers’ interests as a condition of federal funding. Photograph: Martin Argles for the Guardian


A professor friend of mine was telling me recently how popular he was with his vice-chancellor. Not, he stressed, because of his respectable smattering of reasonably original papers in journals with quite short titles. Nor for his teaching, since he hardly did any. No. It was the money he raised.

This is a top table topic at present in academia, as Guardian science contributors have noted. "Can basic research be saved from the tyranny of the profit motive?" asked, for example, Nature's Ananyo Bhattacharya in February, lamenting the perennial cash crisis of blue skies.

But don't ask me how much my pal raised, or the paws from which he prised it. Although I know it was the usual tens and hundreds of grand from a balanced portfolio of industry, government and charity sources, common courtesy discouraged further inquiry. In truth, I don't care. But somebody might. In which case, tough luck on them.

Although triumphant in the common room over their front-of-the-plane funding, successful science academics (particularly in biosciences) are often as publicly transparent about the paymasters behind their publishing as chefs are about rats behind the fridge.