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De La Salle University- Dasmariñas, a Catholic educational institution with diverse stakeholders, strives to uphold its philosophy of social transformation. It is especially true with its research endeavors, which are geared towards establishing the university as an entity with social impact. In line with this, the University Research Office was established with the mandate of advancing scholarly works, and intellectual processes to continuously fuel the cycle of innovation to respond to societal needs.

Challenge

Fostering collaboration among Lasallian institutions and national and international research agencies is essential to realizing DLSU-D’s research mission to positively impact society. DLSU-D views social impact as a fourfold subject – publication, community extension, policy development and commercialization. The success of the university in making its presence felt in those four areas would mean success in its role in the provision of effective instruction and creation and dissemination of meaningful knowledge. A measure of this success could be gauged by how the community and the government utilize research findings to improve people’s lives.

Publication

In the past five years, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of publications by the university’s faculty researchers in journals that are listed in Scopus and Web of Science. Consequently, the number of faculty researchers publishing in such journals have also increased.

It could be attributed to the university’s clear policy on publishing in highly peer-reviewed journals and attractive incentive scheme for publication. As the scheme was proven successful, it is now the goal of the university to raise its publication performance by implementing a more stringent but more rewarding publication incentive scheme. It targets to push its faculty researchers to publish in high-impact journals, ensuring that knowledge generated by our researchers are disseminated and cited globally.

Community extension

The involvement of the university’s research outputs in community extension efforts has been an important mission of the University Research Office (URO). Extension activities are primarily done by presenting the findings of university-funded research projects to various stakeholders. Despite the conduct of such extension activities, the university believes that it can do better. It seeks to maximize its resources for community extension by formally sealing the partnership between URO and the Lasallian Community Development Center. URO provides research outputs that could be used by LCDC in community outreach activities either as bases of implementation or as sources of development programs.

Policy development

Findings of various research projects in the university are also presented and shared to the local government to aid in their policy development and decision-making towards good governance. However, such relationship between the institution and the local government units (LGUs) is yet to be fully realized. The university envisions itself as the foremost institution to be consulted by LGUs for help regarding policy decisions. Better solutions could be achieved when supported by scientific evidence which the university could provide.

Commercialization

The idea of commercialization of intellectual property (IP), which research is an integral part of, is fairly new in tertiary academic institutions in the country. The university promptly responded by creating the intellectual property division of URO and by establishing its own IP policy. Now, the difficult tasks are in the process of obtaining IP protection for the products of research and the actualization of commercializing the university’s IPs.

Principles

In all its undertakings involving research, the university is guided by the following core principles:

• The University shall support, through funding and incentive, all research undertakings that met its set standard or the standards of its external partners.
• The University shall ensure that faculty researchers have the capabilities to do research that would pass critical peer-review processes.
• The University shall make certain that all research from the university will be published in high quality peer-reviewed journals and that they are devoid of any transgression in the moral conduct of publication including fairness in authorship and attribution.
• The University shall secure the welfare of the stakeholders of its research works through a rigorous ethical review.
• The University shall protect all of its rights to its intellectual properties while assuring that all parties involved will get fair share of their rights and duties as regards IP.
• The University shall uphold its mission to spearhead social transformation through all the research projects that it produces.