Research-Knowledge Rights Board Adviser

The mandate

Discovery programmes increasingly depend on academic collaborations, biotech partners, licensed datasets, foundation models and scientists who move between institutions. The company can locate final reports but often cannot determine which experimental conditions, negative results, model versions and reuse rights support a later decision. The board’s standing question is whether research investment is creating an attributable, legally usable knowledge asset or a temporary network of people and permissions that dissolves at programme transition.

The adviser will examine monthly collaboration and portfolio evidence, meet science, data and legal owners before committees, attend three Tokyo sessions and review one external programme. The cadence will challenge provenance, experimental context, negative evidence, model and dataset terms, publication, foreground and background intellectual property, access after termination, scientist departure and decision traceability. Advice will focus on governance choices rather than building a knowledge repository.

The appointment lasts nine months through two collaboration renewals and a discovery portfolio review. Continuation requires an affirmative board minute identifying a new stewardship question after management has adopted evidence-and-rights checkpoints and demonstrated retrieval of one transferred programme without relying on its original principal investigator. The role should close when normal research governance owns these checks, not become external scientific recordkeeping.

The adviser has no line authority and carries no executive responsibility for scientific conclusions, research funding, partnership terms, intellectual-property positions, data licensing, model selection, publication or programme progression. Executives and qualified specialists retain those decisions. The adviser may expose missing rights or provenance and record disagreement but cannot render legal advice or validate scientific evidence.

Conflicts must disclose relationships with universities, biotechs, pharmaceutical companies, data and model providers, publishers, investors and scientific advisers. Programme-specific recusal applies where research or financial ties could impair confidence. The adviser cannot use unpublished findings elsewhere, introduce partners for compensation or pursue a transaction or implementation role based on the confidential review.

Why the board wants this voice

Scientific teams prioritise discovery, legal teams contract for foreseeable uses and data teams retain accessible objects, but knowledge value emerges only when those elements stay connected. Programme reviews tend to discover missing context or rights after key people have left. Directors want a scientist-operator who can challenge collaboration design early, respect genuine uncertainty and make the future usability of evidence visible without bureaucratising research.

What you will own

• Challenge whether programme decisions retain attributable hypotheses, conditions, methods, results, negative evidence, interpretation and unresolved disagreement.
• Examine dataset and model provenance, version, training or use constraints, derived-output rights, access duration and reproducibility implications.
• Test collaboration terms for background and foreground knowledge, publication, transfer, termination, archival access and future permitted use.
• Review scientist succession for tacit experimental judgement that must become inspectable evidence before role or programme transition.
• Assess whether portfolio and licensing decisions can reconstruct the evidence actually relied upon at the relevant point in time.
• Give directors choices where scientific openness, partner trust, legal control and durable enterprise knowledge pull in different directions.
• Leave a governance checkpoint model linking collaboration stage, evidence state, rights, stewardship and accountable decision owner.

Candidate qualifications

• Has governed research knowledge across biopharma discovery, external collaboration, data licensing and programme transition.
• Understands experimental provenance, negative results, model and dataset versions, scientific disagreement and future reproducibility.
• Can identify where contractual reuse rights and technically accessible information diverge without offering unauthorised legal conclusions.
• Has preserved programme knowledge through principal-investigator departure or transfer between discovery and development organisations.
• Works credibly with scientists, research informatics, data governance, intellectual-property counsel, alliance leaders and board directors.
• Advises on future knowledge usability without turning exploratory research into a rigid documentation or stage-gate exercise.

Non-negotiables

• Can attend all Tokyo committee sessions and the designated external-collaboration evidence review over nine months.
• Will disclose academic, biotech, pharma, data-provider, model-provider, investor and publication relationships before programme access.
• Brings scientific evidence and rights stewardship; enterprise search or document-management experience alone is insufficient.
• Will not provide legal opinions, reuse unpublished results or seek compensated introductions or follow-on transactions.

1. 49 words maximum. Which research artefact most often remains accessible but becomes unusable after a collaboration ends?
2. 49 words maximum. How would you preserve negative experimental judgement before a principal investigator departs?
3. 49 words maximum. What model or dataset right would you test before relying on a derived discovery result?