Folks confuse research and administrative layers in making research arrangements.
Research is about the conduct of inquiry. It carries certain conventions. Folks don’t generally sign contracts to work together, publish together–it’s a complex household, where there are commitments and shared resources, but no one is renting the refrigerators to the others. More to the point, it takes the form of a commons–remarkably stable, competitive and collaborative, mixing and matching, surging and sagging. If one wanted to pin it more broadly, the assets take the form of traditional knowledge. The administrative layer, by contrast, is about statutes, regulation, compliance, formality, contracts, clearly defined transactions.
The mistake comes when administrative folks try to handle academic or research commitments in a contract.
First, they mostly can’t do it. This is tough, nuanced drafting, and it’s just outside of most people’s skill to do it. How does one articulate that a company visitor may have access to in-progress degree research, that the degree research is not a trade secret, but the company can’t use or disclose it without the permission of the student doing the research, his or her dissertation adviser, the project he or she is embedded in, and perhaps also the approval of others external to the university involved in the project? So there’s non-disclosure, but there’s not. It’s impossible to draft it well, so folks overshoot, and force a broader NDA on the situation, which then appears to be a restriction on open research, and that sets off a whole cascade of contractual countermeasures.
Second, when administrators do articulate a set of academic expectations via a contract, they usually have succeeded in reducing the mix and match of research opportunity and direction to a single pathway, which they want to do for clarity in a contract, but which also creates overhead for a research program, so usually folks ignore all but the most coarse things, like appointment of a technical point of contact.
In other words, by placing an otherwise stable scholarly practice in a contract, even if they get it right, they restrict transactions to this single approach and put more overhead on the research–which they then also have to manage, or “train” the researchers to manage.
Third, so they get it nuanced and right, and they enforce it on the project and the sponsor–they still don’t have behavior, just a paper representation, so in essence what they have done is greatly increase the apparent risk of breach, the liability for it, added countermeasures in the contract to counteract problems, raised the degree of uncertainty calling for accountability remedies, and added a new administrative cost in “training”, compliance, auditing, and the like.
It makes no sense to aim to improve the pace at which negotiations in the administrative layer of research contracting go forward if the subject matter is inappropriate and the structure of the relationship itself is malformed. Pushing for faster negotiation of contracts that intrude into the research space does nothing to improve university-industry relationships, produce more high performing research, or do a better job making research assets available.
The practice point is: keep academic and research layer things out of contracts, which are in the administrative layer.