When you read a paper about "current research" or "recent findings" of a project, are you sure this project is still ongoing or finished only recently (considering the publication date and the date of reading)? Are you really reading about current research, about something that the authors are currently working on?
If the paper appears as part of proceedings of a computer science or computational linguistics conference, it is fair to draw this conclusion. A paper published in fall 2005 most probably describes research from late 2004 or early 2005. The proceedings appear at the date of the conference at the very latest. Of course authors have to submit their final papers a few weeks in advance -- publishing with Springer, as we do for the Workshop on Systems and Frameworks for Computational Morphology (SFCM), requires editors to submit everything to eight weeks before the conference date, so authors have to submit their final paper roughly three months before the conference (and thus before the presentation of their work). That's pretty fast for an actually printed publication. It could be even faster for electronic publication only, reducing the time span to maybe one month.
However, if you look into other disciplines, publication speed is much slower. The last project at the University of Basel was somewhat interdisciplinary, involving linguistics and computational linguistics. So we went to conferences/workshops in both fields and we also published in both fields. As there are rarely proceedings for linguistic conferences that actually appear at the date of the conference, we usually submitted a paper to a call after the conference. Mostly, those papers appeared in edited volumes as part of a book series.
Due to different publication speed, the very first article we wrote (corresponding to the very first talk we gave during the project -- there had been talks on the topic before the project started) appeared after the project was finished. So everything we said about how to tackle various challenges and what we would like to achieve was published only when we already had those results. Which in general isn't that big of an issue if we would have published all other papers in a similar way: articles on single aspects of the project or on the outcome would appear later.
However, some of the more technical or NLP-related aspects we published at NLP-related conferences. So we now have the strange situation, that the somewhat "starting" paper presented at a conference in April 2011 is published much later (mid 2013) than papers on the infrastructure we developed and used (fall 2012). Someone trying to follow the project thus has a hard timer figuring out what to conclude from which publication.
Late publications are often due to slow processes during submission (extension of deadlines on request of other authors), during review, during revision and resubmission, during editing, and then during actual printing or putting it online. Together with Robert Dale I wrote a handbook chapter which finally appeared now, in February 2014. The whole book project started in early 2011 (probably even earlier as there probably had been negotiations with the publisher first). We submitted our chapter on time, received two reviews and submitted a revised version (i.e., the final version!) in October 2012. And now, one and a half years later, we finally got the printed book. In the meantime I changed universities twice (from Basel to Konstanz to Stuttgart). So I had to report a change in affiliation, author bio, e-mail and postal address twice. If I wouldn't have reported those changes, the editors wouldn't have been able to reach me to ask me look at the galley proofs. (In the end, the publisher send the book to a totally strange address I never reported, anyway ...)
For most of the delays in various processes, explanations can be found. Sometimes someone gets sick, but most of the time it is due to poor production processes. Submitting articles in MS word format with graphics and tables as separate files forces the editor/copy editor to spend a lot of time actually producing appropriately running text including figures and tables. Marking keywords manually on paper slows down indexing extremely. And so it goes on and on.
Given the electronic tools we have today in document processing and document engineering, there is no real reason for slow publication speed. Apart from the discussion on open access and how authors can make an impact by preferring open access publishers, authors can influence the speed of publication by choosing publishers or publishing methods with reasonable processing speed.
Showing posts with label research. Show all posts
Showing posts with label research. Show all posts
Friday, May 9, 2014
Sunday, April 27, 2014
Professor for one year (week 43): Will there be research after your PhD?
This week, the new Rektor of the University of Zurich started his job. There were several articles and interviews in various newspapers, where he announced what he wants to do next and what his long-term goals are. In one article in the NZZ am Sonntag, one sentence struck me: "Wirklich geforscht habe er zuletzt als Doktorand" (The last time he did serious research was as a doctoral student). And he apparently regrets that.
This statement made me wonder: What's your task as postdoc or as professor? When it's not research, is it about writing grant and project proposals for other people only? Is it mainly about teaching (looking at the workload, you could think so, I will comment on that in a later post)? Or are your days filled with more administrative stuff, the higher your professional rank is?
There are several indicators that in fact, postdocs and professors acquire the money to then hire some doctoral student(s) to carry out the research the applicants have a genuine interest in. For example, with the Swiss National Science Foundation, postdocs cannot submit proposals where they actually would carry out the research themselves (except for the Ambizione program, but that has specific requirements and is part of the career track, not of the project track). You can submit a proposal and then hire someone -- but the proposal will be evaluated against the applicant's research profile. The DFG (German Research Foundation) recently introduced an instrument where you can apply for a grant for your own position as postdoc. So this looks a bit better.
On the other hand: As a doctoral student, you are not eligible to submit proposals, so you have to find a postdoc or a professor who submits a project proposal you can then carry out.
Given that proposal writing is a serious but tedious task, there is of course less time to actually do some research. Some universities in Germany have decided that some professors (rank W1 and sometimes even rank W2) cannot negotiate about academic personnel -- there simply will be no academic personnel, you have to write proposals to hopefully acquire third-party money to hire a teaching assistant or a doctoral student. Isn't that weird? Public universities are funded by tax payers, so shouldn't that cover all costs to run a university including all personnel needed? Third-party funding today makes up almost a quarter of the budget of German universities. On the one hand, it's a good sign: researchers find people who think the proposed research is worth funding it. But it's also a bad sign: The state is only able (or willing) to fund three quarters of universities' budgets. But that's more of a political discussion, I think.
However, there seems to be the general perception, that after your doctoral studies, there will be no time for serious research. I recently heard the conversation of two PhD students: A just submitted his thesis and told B that he would have liked to investigate a slightly different topic, but his supervisor told him not to do so because of the risk of failure -- his research could have produced negative results. They both agreed that this would have been more interesting and even more fun than to do something one could somehow even predict the results. And then B concluded: "Only doctoral students do real science, so why don't they let us do risky things? After your dissertation, you will not be able to really investigate something anymore." Isn't that weird? It seems to be widely accepted that your scientific life won't include research after you defended your dissertation; at the same time, it is assumed that you can only do "real" research if you've obtained a PhD, i.e., submit research proposals ...
I really have some research interests in computational morphology, computational phraseology, and writing technology where I would appreciate the help of master students or doctoral students, but where I would also like to explore some things myself -- even if this includes tedious annotation or hacking. That's fun and only this way you can really discover something new. I definitely aim to facilitate research by coordinating and managing projects, but I would still like to be part of the actual investigation.
This statement made me wonder: What's your task as postdoc or as professor? When it's not research, is it about writing grant and project proposals for other people only? Is it mainly about teaching (looking at the workload, you could think so, I will comment on that in a later post)? Or are your days filled with more administrative stuff, the higher your professional rank is?
There are several indicators that in fact, postdocs and professors acquire the money to then hire some doctoral student(s) to carry out the research the applicants have a genuine interest in. For example, with the Swiss National Science Foundation, postdocs cannot submit proposals where they actually would carry out the research themselves (except for the Ambizione program, but that has specific requirements and is part of the career track, not of the project track). You can submit a proposal and then hire someone -- but the proposal will be evaluated against the applicant's research profile. The DFG (German Research Foundation) recently introduced an instrument where you can apply for a grant for your own position as postdoc. So this looks a bit better.
On the other hand: As a doctoral student, you are not eligible to submit proposals, so you have to find a postdoc or a professor who submits a project proposal you can then carry out.
Given that proposal writing is a serious but tedious task, there is of course less time to actually do some research. Some universities in Germany have decided that some professors (rank W1 and sometimes even rank W2) cannot negotiate about academic personnel -- there simply will be no academic personnel, you have to write proposals to hopefully acquire third-party money to hire a teaching assistant or a doctoral student. Isn't that weird? Public universities are funded by tax payers, so shouldn't that cover all costs to run a university including all personnel needed? Third-party funding today makes up almost a quarter of the budget of German universities. On the one hand, it's a good sign: researchers find people who think the proposed research is worth funding it. But it's also a bad sign: The state is only able (or willing) to fund three quarters of universities' budgets. But that's more of a political discussion, I think.
However, there seems to be the general perception, that after your doctoral studies, there will be no time for serious research. I recently heard the conversation of two PhD students: A just submitted his thesis and told B that he would have liked to investigate a slightly different topic, but his supervisor told him not to do so because of the risk of failure -- his research could have produced negative results. They both agreed that this would have been more interesting and even more fun than to do something one could somehow even predict the results. And then B concluded: "Only doctoral students do real science, so why don't they let us do risky things? After your dissertation, you will not be able to really investigate something anymore." Isn't that weird? It seems to be widely accepted that your scientific life won't include research after you defended your dissertation; at the same time, it is assumed that you can only do "real" research if you've obtained a PhD, i.e., submit research proposals ...
I really have some research interests in computational morphology, computational phraseology, and writing technology where I would appreciate the help of master students or doctoral students, but where I would also like to explore some things myself -- even if this includes tedious annotation or hacking. That's fun and only this way you can really discover something new. I definitely aim to facilitate research by coordinating and managing projects, but I would still like to be part of the actual investigation.
Sunday, November 17, 2013
Professor for one year (week 27): Conference season
In the first half of September, I had my conference tour: From a private visit in Paris, I flew to Berlin for two workshops, than back home to Zurich for one day, and than to Florence for a conference. As I had had no time for writing something to submit to ACL, NAACL, and RANLP, I did not attend conferences in August and unfortunately did not meet with some colleagues.
However, I was invited as speaker at the workshop Corpus-based historical linguistics (CBHL) at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. I talked about challenges and solutions for retrieval and annotation of German phrasemes in heterogeneous diachronic TEI corpora, i.e., what I implemented for the OLdPhras project to help phraseologists search phrasemes in Early New High German texts when no linguistic annotation is available.
The next day, together with Michael Piotrowski, I organized the Third International Workshop on Systems and Frameworks for Computational Morphology (SFCM 2013) which also took place at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. We had seven interesting talks and an additional invited talk (also with a publication in the proceedings).
Although both events are labeled "workshop", there is a huge difference: The first one was a linguistics workshop and the latter one a computational linguistics workshop.
When I came back after these two exciting weeks, I actually was a bit exhausted and needed some days to sort ideas, links, papers and papers, and catch up with e-mail messages and other deadlines. However, this is how conference season ends, it's part of the game.
However, I was invited as speaker at the workshop Corpus-based historical linguistics (CBHL) at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. I talked about challenges and solutions for retrieval and annotation of German phrasemes in heterogeneous diachronic TEI corpora, i.e., what I implemented for the OLdPhras project to help phraseologists search phrasemes in Early New High German texts when no linguistic annotation is available.
The next day, together with Michael Piotrowski, I organized the Third International Workshop on Systems and Frameworks for Computational Morphology (SFCM 2013) which also took place at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. We had seven interesting talks and an additional invited talk (also with a publication in the proceedings).
Although both events are labeled "workshop", there is a huge difference: The first one was a linguistics workshop and the latter one a computational linguistics workshop.
- For CBHL, all speakers had been invited by the organizer who set the topic and attracted the audience. Each speaker gave a longer talk of about 50 minutes and then there was some time for discussion. So a "workshop" is more something like a place for getting to know various research, it's not a place to actually work on something together as it might be the case in rhetoric and composition. There will be no publication, so this is only for the "Talks" section in your publication list. Sometimes, somebody arranges for a special issue in a journal or an edited volume in a book series and asks participants to contribute to this publication. So maybe you write an article about the things you presented and some years after the workshop, your contribution is published.
The work we presented at the Conference on New Methods in Historical Corpora in Manchester in April 2011, finally has been published some weeks ago in a volume of the series Korpuslinguistik und interdisziplinäre Perspektiven auf Sprache (CLIP). Meanwhile, the project for which we announced how to proceed, is finished. - SFCM 2013, and workshops in NLP in general, are more small-scale conferences: There had been a call for papers (full papers of 10 to 20 pages according to LNCS style, not 300-words abstracts!) to be reviewed in a double-blind fashion by the members of the program committee. We accepted seven of 15 papers to be published in the proceedings of the workshop and to be presented at the workshop (acceptance rate for workshops is usually higher than for high-end conferences, where you have a 20 to 25% acceptance rate). All authors got elaborate feedback from at least three reviewers; for accepted papers, authors had to revise their papers considering reviewer comments to submit a final version compliant with given style guidelines 10 weeks before the workshop. We (the organizers) then edited the proceedings: writing a preface, creating author indexes and table of contents, fixing style violations, rearranging tables and figures -- i.e., creating a camera-ready version of the proceedings. Everything was then shipped to the publisher who sent galley proofs to all authors and the editors two weeks later. And one week before the workshop, we received the printed volumes. So as organizers, there is no work left after the workshop and participants and everybody else can read about the work presented. It's a very fast process and it helps to make recent research available almost immediately.
So here, "workshop" is also a bit misleading in general. However, for SFCM we incorporate a bit of the literal meaning by having a two-hour demo session where participants (no matter if they gave a talk or are listening only) share recent developments, can get help with implementation issues (in 2011, the invited speaker Lauri Karttunen helped fixing some bugs in XFST scripts) and maybe prepare collaborations.
When I came back after these two exciting weeks, I actually was a bit exhausted and needed some days to sort ideas, links, papers and papers, and catch up with e-mail messages and other deadlines. However, this is how conference season ends, it's part of the game.
Sunday, October 20, 2013
Professor for one year (week 23): Repositories
In today's scientific community, it's all about publications, journals, and impact factors. So you not only publish your research in a high-ranked journal or via a high-ranked conference, but you keep track of your publications, make lists, allow others to access your publications, and hope to get cited.
For me, the best place to store and maintain publications is CiteULike:
I have full control of what is listed here, I can store full papers, and I can extract the publication meta data as BibTeX data. This also means that available categories are consistent with usual BibTeX categories, i.e., article in proceedings, book, edited book, book chapter, thesis, technical report, etc.
CiteULike is also the place I store all bibliographic information of papers and books I read (or I want to read) and the papers itself. I put quite some effort in this: if the paper is available online, I upload it and add the link, if it's from a paper-only publication, I scan it and then store it there. So for almost all of the seven hundred and something papers in my library, I can access the paper itself. I add abstracts and keywords. I can export the meta data as BibTeX and thus use it for referencing stuff when writing an article myself. It's consistent and up-to-date. There is very convenient feature: the Post-to-CiteULike button you can add to your browser. In most of the cases, I can add a reference by using this button and then maybe correcting some information.
The only drawback with CiteULike I encountered over the years: I cannot download all the stored papers at once. It would be very convenient to have off-line access to all data when writing an article -- however, abstract and keywords are included in the BibTeX export, this already is quite nice.
I also have a ResearchGate account I try to maintain:
There are some odd things with ResearchGate: Look at the very first entry, it refers to the proceedings of SFCM 2013. I'm one of the editors of this book. Yes, it's an edited book and/or "conference proceedings (whole)." However, ResearchGate lacks both of these categories: if you choose "book", you have to input "authors." After exchanging quite some e-mails with them, they were finally able to list the publication at all. But it now has authors and editors and those are identical. Very annoying.
Next, ResearchGate tries to find your publications in the Web. When creating an account, this is somewhat convenient, you don't have to input all your publications by hand -- uploading a valid BibTeX file as exported from CiteULike doesn't work properly. However, as publications are listed at various places, sometimes with different (wrong) meta data, it also finds incorrect data. And it comes up again and again and again proposing to add this data -- it's impossible to stop this. Oh, and the number of citations is wrong.
However, it's a nice place to be informed about recent publications of colleagues. I also had an eye-opener some time ago: When you list the people you follow, their names, ResearchGate score, and impact factor is listed. I follow some linguists, some computer scientists, some psychologists, and some computational linguists. And it's very easy to recognize the computational linguists -- they have very low impact factors or none at all. A very nice empirical confirmation that journals (and moreover: indexed journals) don't play a big role in computational linguistics.
I also have a Google Scholar account I try to maintain:
Google Scholar doesn't come up with suggestions to include incorrect data and I can add information myself. The citation number seems to be somewhat realistic, although you never know about the missing citations (except your self-citations).
I also have an account with Microsoft Academic Search I try to maintain:
Here, incorrect information is included -- I'm not into Chemistry, although I did my secondary school written exam in Chemistry, but how should Microsoft know about this? You can try to edit and add data, but it takes a long time until it finally appears. The number of citations is incorrect, the list of conferences, too.
I put most of my publications in ZORA, the Zurich Open Repository and Archive, hosted by the University of Zurich:
I don't maintain this list anymore, so publications there stop in 2011.
I list my publications on my website:
Here the order is by type of publication (journal articles, edited books, book chapters, conference/workshop papers, other) as usually done in the humanities. If possible, I give the link to the full paper, i.e., to a repository (most of the time it's ZORA) or to the original article if published as open access.
And of course I need a list of publications for job and grant applications. Here I order them by year and mark the topic (linguistics, NLP, e-learning, writing research). Additionally, I list the publications "in press" with the date of submission of the final version.
And yes, publication number 32, final version submitted in October 2011, still is "in press".
Oh, and some of my publications are listed in the catalogue of the German National Library and in the ACM Digital Library.
I seem to have an account with Academia, which I don't maintain:
The only reason for this profile: I wanted to download a paper from there following a provided link. But I had to click through a dozen of pop-ups creating my own account before being able to do so. I never access this site and so it includes invalid information, most importantly: No information on co-authors is given. Actually, it seems to be impossible to list co-authors at all.
I still have an account at ResearcherID:
I don't maintain this account. The interface is ugly and maintaining the list is annoying -- you have to use an online version of EndNote, which is slow and not very user friendly at the same time. I think I also lost the password, so I cannot delete this account.
I also had an account with Mendeley, but I managed to delete this one some months ago. It was as user friendly as ResearcherID, I never used it.
That's a lot of places. But wait, I also added some publications to the Konstanzer Online-Publikations-System(KOPS) and some to the Uni Basel Research Database (those publications that had been published when I was employed at these places -- and yes, some publications appear at both places, some because I had been employed at both places at the same time, some because the co-authors belong to different institutions):
I used to list my publications also on the website I had at the University of Zurich and at the University of Basel -- I don't maintain a website at the University of Konstanz, there is only a link to my private-professional website. And when I start a new job at another institution, I will probably link to my CiteULike list of publications only.
But maybe the perfect repository is still to come?
For me, the best place to store and maintain publications is CiteULike:
I have full control of what is listed here, I can store full papers, and I can extract the publication meta data as BibTeX data. This also means that available categories are consistent with usual BibTeX categories, i.e., article in proceedings, book, edited book, book chapter, thesis, technical report, etc.
CiteULike is also the place I store all bibliographic information of papers and books I read (or I want to read) and the papers itself. I put quite some effort in this: if the paper is available online, I upload it and add the link, if it's from a paper-only publication, I scan it and then store it there. So for almost all of the seven hundred and something papers in my library, I can access the paper itself. I add abstracts and keywords. I can export the meta data as BibTeX and thus use it for referencing stuff when writing an article myself. It's consistent and up-to-date. There is very convenient feature: the Post-to-CiteULike button you can add to your browser. In most of the cases, I can add a reference by using this button and then maybe correcting some information.
The only drawback with CiteULike I encountered over the years: I cannot download all the stored papers at once. It would be very convenient to have off-line access to all data when writing an article -- however, abstract and keywords are included in the BibTeX export, this already is quite nice.
I also have a ResearchGate account I try to maintain:
There are some odd things with ResearchGate: Look at the very first entry, it refers to the proceedings of SFCM 2013. I'm one of the editors of this book. Yes, it's an edited book and/or "conference proceedings (whole)." However, ResearchGate lacks both of these categories: if you choose "book", you have to input "authors." After exchanging quite some e-mails with them, they were finally able to list the publication at all. But it now has authors and editors and those are identical. Very annoying.
Next, ResearchGate tries to find your publications in the Web. When creating an account, this is somewhat convenient, you don't have to input all your publications by hand -- uploading a valid BibTeX file as exported from CiteULike doesn't work properly. However, as publications are listed at various places, sometimes with different (wrong) meta data, it also finds incorrect data. And it comes up again and again and again proposing to add this data -- it's impossible to stop this. Oh, and the number of citations is wrong.
However, it's a nice place to be informed about recent publications of colleagues. I also had an eye-opener some time ago: When you list the people you follow, their names, ResearchGate score, and impact factor is listed. I follow some linguists, some computer scientists, some psychologists, and some computational linguists. And it's very easy to recognize the computational linguists -- they have very low impact factors or none at all. A very nice empirical confirmation that journals (and moreover: indexed journals) don't play a big role in computational linguistics.
I also have a Google Scholar account I try to maintain:
Google Scholar doesn't come up with suggestions to include incorrect data and I can add information myself. The citation number seems to be somewhat realistic, although you never know about the missing citations (except your self-citations).
I also have an account with Microsoft Academic Search I try to maintain:
Here, incorrect information is included -- I'm not into Chemistry, although I did my secondary school written exam in Chemistry, but how should Microsoft know about this? You can try to edit and add data, but it takes a long time until it finally appears. The number of citations is incorrect, the list of conferences, too.
I put most of my publications in ZORA, the Zurich Open Repository and Archive, hosted by the University of Zurich:
I don't maintain this list anymore, so publications there stop in 2011.
I list my publications on my website:
Here the order is by type of publication (journal articles, edited books, book chapters, conference/workshop papers, other) as usually done in the humanities. If possible, I give the link to the full paper, i.e., to a repository (most of the time it's ZORA) or to the original article if published as open access.
And of course I need a list of publications for job and grant applications. Here I order them by year and mark the topic (linguistics, NLP, e-learning, writing research). Additionally, I list the publications "in press" with the date of submission of the final version.
And yes, publication number 32, final version submitted in October 2011, still is "in press".
Oh, and some of my publications are listed in the catalogue of the German National Library and in the ACM Digital Library.
I seem to have an account with Academia, which I don't maintain:
The only reason for this profile: I wanted to download a paper from there following a provided link. But I had to click through a dozen of pop-ups creating my own account before being able to do so. I never access this site and so it includes invalid information, most importantly: No information on co-authors is given. Actually, it seems to be impossible to list co-authors at all.
I still have an account at ResearcherID:
I don't maintain this account. The interface is ugly and maintaining the list is annoying -- you have to use an online version of EndNote, which is slow and not very user friendly at the same time. I think I also lost the password, so I cannot delete this account.
I also had an account with Mendeley, but I managed to delete this one some months ago. It was as user friendly as ResearcherID, I never used it.
That's a lot of places. But wait, I also added some publications to the Konstanzer Online-Publikations-System(KOPS) and some to the Uni Basel Research Database (those publications that had been published when I was employed at these places -- and yes, some publications appear at both places, some because I had been employed at both places at the same time, some because the co-authors belong to different institutions):
I used to list my publications also on the website I had at the University of Zurich and at the University of Basel -- I don't maintain a website at the University of Konstanz, there is only a link to my private-professional website. And when I start a new job at another institution, I will probably link to my CiteULike list of publications only.
But maybe the perfect repository is still to come?
Saturday, June 29, 2013
Professor for one year (week 11): What does University contribute to Society?
Last week, I participated in the Global Perspectives Programme, a joint program from University of Basel and Virginia Tech to foster academic exchange about Higher Education. This year, the topic of the program was "University and Society: Meeting Expectations?" We explored various aspects of "Society," "University," and "Expectations." There are so many definitions and views of these broad concepts, that one could discuss hours and hours. One aspect, however, is what university is expected to contribute to society. Is it about providing solutions to current or future problems? Is it about foreseeing future problems? Is it about developing resources to be used for society's needs? Is university urged to serve society and provide what society explicitly wants or to provide what society unconsciously needs? So far, we wondered, what kind of solution universities would produce.
Most of the time, faculty and administration talked just about the questions we were exploring. During our one-week trip in the US, the Basel group also visited Virginia Tech and had a vivid conversation with faculty of the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute (VBI). Christopher Barrett, Scientific Director of the VBI, argued that universities would provide methods and tools to be used by society, i.e., policy-makers, to solve problems. He emphasized that universities do not contribute solutions for current or future problems.
This statement made me wonder: At the one hand, with an attitude like this -- universities provide resources and tools to be used by others -- there is much room for basic research, i.e., research with no urgent application but that could be useful in the future. Researchers are freed from the pressure to explicitly show usefulness in today's society. And it makes clear that society is responsible for solving problems and for making use of the provided resources and tools. A very comfortable statement for research, I think.
On the other hand, it reminded me a bit of the drama "Die Physiker" (The Physicists) by Friedrich Dürrenmatt from 1961 and the Manhattan Project (Einstein later regretted having signed the letter to Roosevelt in 1939 recommending that atom bombs be made). And more so as Barrett told us that he had worked at Los Alamos before coming to VBI. When universities -- or more precisely: researchers -- say that they only provide tools to be used by whomever, researchers implicitly say that they are not responsible for any outcome. A researcher invents something, hands it over to the public and then doesn't care about how and by whom it is used.
Although I appreciate the attitude to provide resources and tools rather than tailored solutions, I think universities should carefully state how to make use of their tools and emphasize the intended use. Researchers should always take into account possible use of their findings -- the affordances -- and how to prevent criminal, inhuman, or warlike use.
This statement made me wonder: At the one hand, with an attitude like this -- universities provide resources and tools to be used by others -- there is much room for basic research, i.e., research with no urgent application but that could be useful in the future. Researchers are freed from the pressure to explicitly show usefulness in today's society. And it makes clear that society is responsible for solving problems and for making use of the provided resources and tools. A very comfortable statement for research, I think.
On the other hand, it reminded me a bit of the drama "Die Physiker" (The Physicists) by Friedrich Dürrenmatt from 1961 and the Manhattan Project (Einstein later regretted having signed the letter to Roosevelt in 1939 recommending that atom bombs be made). And more so as Barrett told us that he had worked at Los Alamos before coming to VBI. When universities -- or more precisely: researchers -- say that they only provide tools to be used by whomever, researchers implicitly say that they are not responsible for any outcome. A researcher invents something, hands it over to the public and then doesn't care about how and by whom it is used.
Although I appreciate the attitude to provide resources and tools rather than tailored solutions, I think universities should carefully state how to make use of their tools and emphasize the intended use. Researchers should always take into account possible use of their findings -- the affordances -- and how to prevent criminal, inhuman, or warlike use.
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