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Consideration of Technology Transfer in Tenure and Promotion

Universities face increasing expectations from both the public and elected officials to contribute to the economic development of their respective states, geographical regions, and the country. Technology transfer activities have proven to be a key way to meet these new imperatives. Despite the university’s expanded mission and the growing role of tech transfer, the academic community has yet to produce a consistent framework for evaluating faculty activities in technology transfer and their societal benefits. In response to this situation, the authors, working as the APLU Task Force on Tenure, Promotion, and Technology Transfer, surveyed US and Canadian universities to ascertain current approaches for defining technology transfer activities and recognizing them in assessing faculty performance. Building on the results of that survey, the authors offered the following five recommendations: 1) university policy statements should acknowledge the merit of technology transfer as part of the university’s work, while including safeguards against conflicts of interest or commitment; 2) technology transfer activities should be explicitly included among the criteria relevant for promotion and tenure at the university, college, and department levels, as appropriate to the respective disciplines; 3) technology transfer activities should be an optional component of the review process, one that will be rewarded when present but not seen as a requirement for everyone; 4) recognizing the unique character of technology transfer, the criteria should be flexible enough to encompass high-quality work in many forms of creative expression; and 5) technology transfer activities should be evaluated for intellectual contribution and expected social benefit consistent with the accepted process of peer review and without reliance on artificial metrics

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Consideration of Technology Transfer in Tenure and Promotion

Universities face increasing expectations from both the public and elected officials to contribute to the economic development of their respective states, geographical regions, and the country. Technology transfer activities have proven to be a key way to meet these new imperatives. Despite the university’s expanded mission and the growing role of tech transfer, the academic community has yet to produce a consistent framework for evaluating faculty activities in technology transfer and their societal benefits. In response to this situation, the authors, working as the APLU Task Force on Tenure, Promotion, and Technology Transfer, surveyed US and Canadian universities to ascertain current approaches for defining technology transfer activities and recognizing them in assessing faculty performance. Building on the results of that survey, the authors offered the following five recommendations: 1) university policy statements should acknowledge the merit of technology transfer as part of the university’s work, while including safeguards against conflicts of interest or commitment; 2) technology transfer activities should be explicitly included among the criteria relevant for promotion and tenure at the university, college, and department levels, as appropriate to the respective disciplines; 3) technology transfer activities should be an optional component of the review process, one that will be rewarded when present but not seen as a requirement for everyone; 4) recognizing the unique character of technology transfer, the criteria should be flexible enough to encompass high-quality work in many forms of creative expression; and 5) technology transfer activities should be evaluated for intellectual contribution and expected social benefit consistent with the accepted process of peer review and without reliance on artificial metrics.This article is from Technology & Innovation, Volume 17, Number 4, 2016, pp. 197-204(8), doi:10.3727/194982416X14520374943103.</p