Tokyo

Japanese academics are nervously eyeing a government plan that would open up the country's main research programmes to industrial participation for the first time.

University researchers worry that the plan, which is being considered by Japan's highest scientific decision-making body, the Council for Science and Technology Policy (CSTP), could lead to a major transfer of resources from universities to more applied research projects in industrial labs.

As the moment, industrial researchers cannot apply for Japan's largest competitive grant programme, which distributed ¥143 billion (US$1.2 billion) last year. The 'grants-in-aid' programme, which provides about half of all the competitive research funding available in Japan, is vital to the country's basic research. But Hiroo Imura, chairman of the CSTP's grant-reform committee, says that all funding sources should be open to all researchers, regardless of affiliation.

Japan's prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, said at the CSTP's plenary session on 28 March that the 'grants-in-aid' programme should be “fundamentally revamped”, according to a subsequent briefing by government officials. The CSTP committee will spell out details of the revamp in a report early next month.

Advocates of the plan point out that US corporations have benefited for years from government research grants. Statistics from the US National Science Foundation show that 40% of all US federal grant money for research and development went to industry in 2001, compared with only 10% in Japan.

The CSTP report is expected to argue that the change is needed to enhance the diversity of grantees and to encourage competition between academic and industrial researchers, in line with university reforms (see Nature 419, 875–876; 2002).

But Takahisa Onishi, an official at the education ministry who deals with university grants, says the real motive is to help Japanese companies that have been forced by economic recession to slash their own research budgets.

The universities are furious at the plan, but may be powerless to stop it. Tadamitsu Kishimoto, president of Osaka University, who serves on the CSTP committee, predicts that the change will effectively divert money into applied work with quick results, at the expense of long-term basic research.

Industrialists, unsurprisingly, are more upbeat. Ikunoshin Kato, president of Takara Bio, a Japanese biotechnology company, who is also on the CSTP committee, says: “It's not fair that we can't apply for large grants simply because we are in the private sector.”