Performing Strategic Science in the Public Interest: Updating the Policy Debate Regarding Government Science
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The performance of science and technology (S&T) activities in the federal government has long been supported as a means of advancing innovation and economic objectives as well as of addressing public policy and regulatory needs. As Canada’s science and innovation system has matured, however, the federal government’s relative contribution to Canada’s overall performance of research and development has declined significantly—from about 30% (of total spending) in 1971 to under 9% today. Throughout this period, a dominant policy theme with respect to government S&T has been to migrate these activities from government into the private or academic sectors. The authors trace this history and argue that science policy thinking regarding federally-performed S&T must evolve with the changing position of government laboratories in Canada’s science and innovation system. A case is made for maintaining an adequate S&T capacity within the federal government in order to deliver on unique public interest roles.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.057 | 0.099 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.056 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.048 | 0.019 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.034 | 0.029 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".