U.S. government to review research security
Is the U.S. government preparing to narrow what research can be shared openly?
Science reports that the National Science Foundation, or NSF, is poised to revisit the classification system for federally funded research. Specifically, NSF has asked the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to hold a workshop this year on factors affecting whether research is considered open or classified.
For decades, the default has been to make fundamental research — that is, research without obvious security or commercial uses — as open as possible. That’s been the case even during the Cold War. Current federal research-security policy, in fact, dates to the 1980s and has a focus on putting “high walls around a very narrow set of technologies,” leaving the rest of research unrestricted.
Just three years ago, an independent advisory commission reviewed the policy and concluded it did not need to be updated.
But as I’ve written, geopolitics and national-security concerns have led to pressure to narrow what findings can be shared, especially with researchers in other countries.
China has sought to build up its own research capacity, leading to concerns that the Chinese government might be exploiting the openness of American campuses to poach intellectual property. The goal of the recently concluded China Initiative was to root out academic and economic espionage by China, although prosecutions brought as part of the government investigation have focused not on the sharing of scientific secrets but on issues such as researchers’ failure to disclose China ties on federal grant applications.
There has also been growth in recent years of a third category of research, known as controlled but unclassified, subject to some government restrictions. Because it has never been clearly defined, controlled but unclassified research is a gray area, leading to confusion.
Rebecca Keiser, chief of research security for the NSF, told Science that goal of the workshop would be to assess whether the longstanding research-security policy needs to be revisited. “It will help us reflect on where we are now and talk with the community about ways to maintain openness and security.”
Still, the idea of new limits on scientific openness is likely to get strong pushback from people in the higher-education and scientific communities, who worry they could diminish the United States’ strength as an intellectual and research powerhouse. “Openness is axiomatic for scientists,” John Mester, chief executive of the Universities Research Association, a consortium that runs several government research facilities, said to Science. “But its value has not been articulated in a convincing way to the outside community.”