This not only shows a progressive mindset but is also a necessary step to encourage innovation - a field inherently associated with experimentation, errors and failures.
However, to ensure that risk acceptance is not difficult for genuine scientists, as well as not becoming a "trick" for those who "team" to do research to deceive, there must be a clear mechanism to determine the boundary.
In reality, there is a very typical illustrative situation. As recently in Quang Ngai, two research topics on planting and developing medicinal plants costing more than 5 billion VND, including nearly 3 billion VND from the state budget, are being assessed as uncomplete and are being clarified by the police.
The two topics of mass tree deaths, which businesses are in charge of, explained that the failure is due to objective reasons, from weather, epidemics, heat, floods, COVID-19, etc., without seeing any subjective causes.
If we consider failures, such as the two topics in Quang Ngai as "scientific risks" and accept them as inevitable, we are sending a false signal that: doing science may not need to take any responsibility when it fails.
That is completely opposite to the spirit of law reform. As Chairman of the Delegation Work Committee Nguyen Thanh Hai emphasized: "Sciences have trials and mistakes, 100 studies have only one right, but 99 mistakes are the premise for future generations not to follow the old path".
But the mandatory condition is that the mistake must be transparent, well-founded, with procedures, and supervised. It is impossible to confuse scientific errors and weakness in organizing implementation, or worse, negligence for profit.
The revised law needs to boldly admit that risks are a part of research, but must come with strict criteria on assessment, conditional exemption mechanisms, and especially not to let "scientific shadow" topics get lost in the budget.
Clarifying the line between accepted risks and law violations is inevitable if the law is to take effect, not become a loose, crowded shirt.
More importantly, accepting risks does not mean abandoning the principle of efficiency. Each budget for science must be used transparently, to the right goals and bring value, whether it is the value of knowledge creation or application transfer.
The failed topics also have to leave data, documents, and analysis basis to help those who follow learn and learn from experience.
Therefore, when the law is being revised, what needs to be done is not only to increase protection for those who do research on the spot, but also to strengthen the mechanism of screening, supervision and handling so that no one can turn scientific experiment into a cover for suspicious failures.
