"Nakikita ko kasi na yung commercialization of many of our technologies, especially those which had been developed by universities, hindi na-cocommercialize because there is this thinking that these researches are funded by public funds," DoST Secretary Estrella Alabastro said.

She said that there is an underlying ethical issue on the commercialization of technologies funded by the government and on the "involvement" of the researcher on the commercialization of the developed technology. She did not elaborate.

Alabastro said the need to fasttrack the drafting of a comprehensive Technology Transfer Law is being pushed to put an end to the issue and enhance the field of research and development (R & D) in the country.

She cited a law in the United States called the "Bayh Dole Law" which was enacted to "accelerate the commercialization of technologies."

The Bayh-Dole Act or the Patent and Trademark Law Amendment Act, enacted by the US Congress on Dec. 12, 1980, gave universities, small businesses, and non-profit organizations in the US the intellectual property control of their inventions that resulted from federal government-funded research.

"The university can claim (its rights on) intellectual property and have it (technology) commercialized," Alabastro said.

The DoST chief also cited the usual constraints of researchers in coming up with a successful research work.

These include the meager R & D fund allocation, lack of concrete strategic programs, inadequate funding of intellectual property rights (IPR) and technology transfer costs, a weak government, academe, and industry, as well as no ample financial backing.

"We believe that there is still room for expansion and it should start with knowing what policy should be adopted in order to address this problem on R & D," she said.

She added that despite the "dwindling and inadequate resources allocated" for Science and Technology (S & T), efforts must still be pursued to achieve an improvement of mobility in research careers in both the public and private sector; improvement of the education system to meet the growing demand of workers in the S & T field; pursuance of a strong Science linkage, improvement of the accountability of S & T policies; and increase international cooperation in S & T to meet the broad range of emerging global challenges.