Credit: Yuichiro Chino/Getty
EARMA conference hears that researchers might need help as knowledge-security laws become increasingly complex.
4 May 2024
Yuichiro Chino/Getty
Helping researchers to avoid the possibility of their work being used in the development of military weapons, and complying with a growing number of laws related to knowledge security, are likely to be key roles for research managers and administrators (RMAs) in the future, a conference has heard.
Various speakers at the European Association of Research Managers and Administrators (EARMA) annual conference, held in Odense, Denmark, on April 23 to 25, stressed that RMAs increasingly needed to guide scientists on information security, while there might even be a need for dedicated roles in academic institutions in the area.
Debra Schaller-Demers, senior director for research integrity and compliance at New York University, said that in the United States, a specific federal government directive called NSPM-33 (National Security Presidential Memorandum-33) was one example where institutions receiving public science funding were being placed under greater scrutiny.
“All institutions with more than US$50 million in research and development funds must have a research security plan” under the directive, Schaller-Demers said, including setting out how they were dealing with cyber security or training researchers in information security. “Our federal sponsors are looking at who we are doing business with, and what we can or cannot do.”
Ensuring that research projects comply with such regulations is a task that “isn’t going away any time soon”, so it could provide an opportunity for RMAs who are worried that artificial intelligence (AI) could replace some of their roles in other areas, such as grant proposal writing, Schaller-Demers said.
In a separate session, Stijn Delauré, a research and innovation adviser for Belgium during its European Union presidency, said that guidelines on research security were also being prepared by the European Commission.
“It is not to block research or international collaboration. It is to create awareness that some things might go wrong if you don’t pay attention. So, guidance for that is being set up and I think research managers need to be aware of this. It is the research managers that will need to guide researchers,” he said.
Risk reduction
Another session at the conference heard that data on research collaboration could increasingly prove important for research managers who were assessing risks.
Luke George, a product-solutions manager at Digital Science, a research-analytics company based in London that has been developing a tool to aid such assessment, shared examples of media reports in the last year where university research had been linked to weapons development, particularly military drones.
(Digital Science is part of Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, the majority shareholder in Nature Index’s publisher, Springer Nature. Nature Index’s news team is editorially independent of Springer Nature).
George said that such reports were “probably not outliers” and were “likely to be increasingly common” given the huge growth in international research collaboration and rise in open data on research, which the media could also scrutinise.
At the same time, the number of government mandates on research and information security had “multiplied” with a “shared narrative” that universities needed to be more wary of the balance between open collaboration and security.
George said the trend would affect lots of organizations, not just in science, “but the reason the spotlight is on universities and research institutions is because they are at the forefront of developing these emerging technologies”, especially those that can have “dual use” for civilian and military purposes.