DailyDirt: Science Policies For The US

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Wed, Nov 9th 2011 5:00pm — Michael Ho

We're generally interested in government policies that affect the discovery of information or the creation of new works. Usually this means we focus on copyright issues, but science policies are also important to us -- so here are just a few gov't policies that have been released.

US research in synthetic biology isn't subject to a lot of new government regulations (yet), but there will be an exhaustive evaluation of current government funding for synthetic biology projects. That exhaustive report should be available to the public in a few more months... [url]
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is trying to make it a bit easier to be a scientist by allowing for some flexibility for budding scientists -- such as cutting back on the demands to travel to NSF headquarters for renewals/applications. The new rules will also allow grant recipients to defer their projects for up to a year to raise children. [url]
The US government's policy for isolating scientific research from politics was released last year. The guidelines set "minimum standards" for federal agencies to meet, and didn't really spell out many specifics. [url]
To discover more interesting science-related stuff, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

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Filed Under: grants, guidelines, policy, regulations, science, synthetic biology
Companies: nsf

3 Comments

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Anonymous Coward, 9 Nov 2011 @ 9:02pm

hmm.
It'll be interesting to see if there are any studies on the effect of letting scientists delay their grants to raise kids... and if this policy actually results in any measurable change in the scientific community.
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abc gum, 10 Nov 2011 @ 6:19am

"government policies that affect the discovery of information or the creation of new works."

Maybe I'm just a pessimist, but my understanding of past government policies regarding science is that they have hindered more than helped scientific endeavors. I find it hard to believe anything has changed in this regard. The words put in writing seldom match the policy as implemented.
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Michael Ho (profile), 10 Nov 2011 @ 2:01pm

Re:
The US gov't funds a pretty amazing array of research projects through the NIH and DARPA... so the gov't isn't hindering all aspects of science!
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