Prometheus: Vol 35, No 2 (2017)

By Stuart Macdonald page: 93 - 95 Prometheus: Critical Studies in Innovation Volume 35, Issue 2 SKU: 0810-90281557938

By Dagmara M. Weckowska To manage the transition to the open access (OA) model of scholarly publishing, we need to understand better what enables, encourages and inhibits the adoption of OA publishing among scientists, and to appreciate individual differences within disciplines. The study adopts a psychological perspective to elucidate motivations, capabilities and opportunities for OA publishing among bioscientists in the UK. To identify differences within the discipline, bioscientists with starkly different past practices for disclosing research data and technologies were interviewed. The sampled bioscientists face similar obstacles and enablers in their physical environment, but that their motivations and experience of their social environments differ. One group is strongly motivated by their moral convictions and beliefs in benefits of OA and feels peer pressure related to OA. The other group expresses fewer pro-OA beliefs, holds beliefs demotivating OA publishing, but feels pressure from research funders to adopt it. The former group makes more frequent use of OA publishing, which suggests that only those with strong motivations will work to overcome the social and physical obstacles. The individual differences within the discipline suggest that bioscientists are unlikely to respond to OA policies in the same way and, thus, the appropriateness of one-size-fits-all OA policies is questioned. page: 111 - 135 Prometheus: Critical Studies in Innovation Volume 35, Issue 2 SKU: 0810-90281408289

By William Kingston This report, funded by UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the International Public Policy Institute, has the great merit of being a study of innovation failure, rather than success, and the number of useful lessons it contains is consequently all the greater. From a massive database, it estimates that, between 2000 and 2017, the UK provided close to half a billion pounds of public sector funding to encourage the private sector to try to capture offshore wave energy. Investment by firms must have been even more. There was nothing tangible to show for all this in the end, primarily because of inadequacies ‘in government and industrial strategy to support wave energy innovation in the UK, most notably a premature emphasis on commercialisation and a lack of knowledge exchange.’ Public funding only partially covered R&D costs, so that developers tried to reach the stage where their equipment could actually produce saleable energy, without enough testing for faults. This attempt to ‘go too far too quickly’ was compounded by government’s investing heavily in test facilities without providing support for developers to use them. Also, reliance on patent protection caused developers to avoid sharing their information. The public sector did learn some lessons. Wave Energy Scotland was established to carry on the work in a much more modest way, but able to offer 100% funding and to insist that research results were shared among developers. In addition, the European Community introduced the Marinet initiative to fund access by developers to test facilities. page: 145 - 158 Prometheus: Critical Studies in Innovation Volume 35, Issue 2 SKU: 0810-90281486534

By Steven Umbrello page: 160 - 161 Prometheus: Critical Studies in Innovation Volume 35, Issue 2 SKU: 0810-90281486470

By Marcelo Rinesi page: 163 - 165 Prometheus: Critical Studies in Innovation Volume 35, Issue 2 SKU: 0810-90281505877