Business Reporter: Research security – protecting integrity, compliance, and funding

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Research, the lifeblood of universities, is coming under increasingly sophisticated attacks from hostile state-sponsored actors, who siphon off valuable intelligence. Compliance plays a central role in creating the resilience that can help fend off these attacks. As Heidi Becker , Product Manager for Dimensions Research Security explained in a Business Reporter Talk, research security, the installation of controls and processes to make research resilient to attacks, is an emerging field.

 

Dimensions Research Security, the world’s largest connected research database by Digital Science, covering publications, conference abstracts, grants, patents, clinical trials, datasets and policy documents, has been designed to support research institutions on their compliance journey. In addition to providing an intuitive access to an enormous body of research data, the platform also enables researchers to get a deeper understanding of who they are collaborating with, what entities make up their research ecosystem and whether there is a restricted entity among their collaborators.

 

One of the major barriers to transparency is self-disclosure and the unwillingness to reveal the funders, collaborations and affiliations of a project.  Dimensions helps researchers to bridge this information gap and verify missing information for themselves. Risks that researchers must face can range from intellectual property theft to the breach of military intelligence. Educating researchers about these threats is part of Dimensions’s mission too. As risk assessment is highly context dependent, the tool is designed to be flexible. The point is not to thwart funding and collaborations but to help assess what mitigation plans must be put in place to make the partnership less risky. While it was the EU that started the conversation about research security, now the ball is in the European universities’ court to build capacity, new structures and processes. Markus Laitinen, Head of Development at the University of Helsinki, who has been working in the international collaborations field for decades, advocated for striking the right balance between collaboration and security.

 

As Becker explained, research institutions struggle with similar problems across the globe. As many aspects of the end-to-end research value chain have touchpoints with research security – export control or pre- and post-award workflows – mature institutions now spread research security across a wide range of functions instead of having a small, dedicated team. Dimensions, which works both at an organisational and an individual level, can help human teams accelerate the search process and automate tasks that have previously been done manually. It can also assist research groups in demonstrating towards their funders that they have done thorough due diligence and can be trusted – thus serving both funders and awardees. Dimensions will also make it easier for universities to apply to funding agencies with different requirements and eligibility criteria.

 

For the University of Helsinki, Dimensions helped build a foundation for achieving compliance with recent research security regulations in Finland. In the US, research security regulations are more stringent than in Europe, while the approach Canada is taking is more explicit, prescribing what international institutions Canadian universities are to avoid. In contrast, the German regulation operates on a case by case basis. Peer-to-peer learning will have a major role in raising awareness of this emerging area. Currently, it widely varies who owns research security risk – it can come under the security risk umbrella, legal or international affairs. It’s also key that reporting lines and processes get established, which should be a cross-functional exercise. In the US, however, under NSPM-33, a university has a mandate to set up a research security department to be eligible for government funding above a certain amount.