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Google funds academic researchers to help sway opinion and public policy, The Wall Street Journal reported. Over the past decade, the search engine has reportedly financed hundreds of research papers to help fight regulation that could harm it, via stipends of $5,000 to $400,000. Some researchers share their papers prior to publication, allowing Google to make suggestions, according to thousands of pages of emails obtained by the Journal through open-records requests to more than a dozen institutions.
The professors in question don’t always disclose Google’s backing, according to the Journal. Paul Heald, a professor of law at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, for example, reportedly pitched a paper on copyrights to Google and received $18,830 to fund it, yet the 2012 publication made no mention of the relationship. “Oh, wow. No, I didn’t. That’s really bad,” Heald reportedly told the Journal, saying that the money did not influence his findings, and that Google gave him no conditions. “That’s purely oversight.”
Google also pitched academic papers with working titles and abstracts to willing academic authors, a former employee for the company told the newspaper. Google told the Journal that it has always “maintained strong relations with universities and research institutes, and [has] always valued their independence and integrity. … We’re happy to support academic researchers across computer science and policy topics, including copyright, free expression and surveillance, and to help amplify voices that support the principles of an open internet.”
