TURKEY: Science needs more autonomy, report says

Turkey has not achieved the status of a "scientific society" and science in the country requires more independence from politics to achieve that goal, according to a new report based on extensive interviews with scientists, reports Hürriyet Daily News.

According to the recently release 2009 Science Report by the Turkish Academy of Sciences, universities and scientific research and development in Turkey are lacking, and support for such initiatives is too heavily concentrated in the public sector. Citing data from the Turkish Statistical Institute, or TurkStat, the report noted that industry contributed 43.8% of funding spent on research and development, while the state contributed 52.2%. It said the private sector should ideally be contributing three to four times as much as the government to R&D.

In addition, the fact that only 338 domestic patents were accepted in 2008 out of 2,268 applications, meant "there is a lot more distance to cover," according to the report, which was prepared based on interviews with 135 members of the academy.
Full report on the Daily News site