'Foreigners benefit from local research'

The Jakarta Post, Bogor

The results of research conducted by locals often ends up benefiting foreigners because of poor documentation here, an official said on Tuesday.

Utari Budijarjo, an information network development assistant to the deputy state minister for research and technology, said that many local researchers did not really care about the documentation of their research findings.

She said that usually researchers would make between 10 to 20 copies of their research reports. Even though they were obliged to submit a copy to the National Library, they rarely did so. They only felt it necessary to supply copies to the sponsors who financed the research, Utari said.

Foreigners, who were aware of the importance of these documents, would then come to take a look at the reports, and later on bring these to their own countries.

"On the one hand, this is good for Indonesia as the results of the research are well preserved abroad.

"On the other hand, however, this make us suffer because at the end of the day, we have to buy back the results of the research from them. This is exactly what has happened with research that was conducted on cucumbers here," she said.

The foreigners who frequently came here to ascertain the results of research carried out by locals were mostly from the Netherlands, Australia, United States, Singapore and Malaysia.

"Every year, there are Malaysian librarians who come here just to see the results of our research," she said.

Utari made her statement while handing over a software package and a server for a digital library at the Bogor Institute of Agriculture (IPB).

The IPB has been named as one of seven educational institutions in the country which have been assigned the task of developing knowledge management.

Three of the others are the Center for Documentation and Information of the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI), the Association of Catholic Higher Education Institutes (APTIK), and the Bandung National Institute of Technology (Itenas).

The ministry has yet to decide on the other three institutes.