The Invisible Costs of Science: Governing Continuity in BrazilPublic debate on science funding in Brazil is centered on direct, tangible, and politically visible investments: grants, fellowships, laboratories, and flagship projects. Yet science also fails when research is funded, but its outcomes are not institutionally sustained. Beyond initial investment lies a quieter layer of obligations: recurring costs to preserve intellectual property, maintain infrastructure, curate data, and protect technological assets. These “invisible costs” rarely enter strategic planning, but their neglect can nullify years of public investment. The issue is not scientific quality or budget cuts per se, but the absence of institutional mechanisms treating continuity as a core dimension of governance.
Brazil’s research system allocates resources competitively at the front end of the knowledge pipeline but lacks a robust back-end architecture to preserve accumulated intellectual assets. Costs such as patent maintenance, international extensions, long-term data storage, and infrastructure upkeep are predictable yet depend on fragmented, short-term budgets. Reports on irregular funding cycles in Brazil show how discontinuities undermine long-term scientific capacity (Ramalho et al. 2025). International evidence similarly indicates that research infrastructures require sustained lifecycle support rather than one-off investments (OECD, 2019). Programs like PROINFA–FINEP (FNDCT 2025) occasionally support infrastructure, but during fiscal stress these expenditures become vulnerable. Even modest maintenance costs can determine whether publicly funded research remains a national asset or becomes freely exploitable by external actors.
While prior studies have examined funding dynamics (Pinheiro-Machado & Oliveira, 2001, Thelwall et al. 2023, Gomes et al. 2024) and intellectual property management (Pojo et al. 2016, Eschenfelder et al. 2022), they largely overlook long-term maintenance governance, i.e., sustained resource allocation to preserve intellectual property, strategic datasets, biobanks, and research infrastructures beyond initial funding cycles. Brazilian science policy still equates “investment” with creation rather than preservation, requiring institutional innovation.
The establishment of a National Scientific Continuity Fund, legally ring-fenced and multi-year, dedicated to maintaining critical research assets and operating independently from annual project grants to reduce fiscal volatility, could help address this issue. This may introduce budgetary rigidity but would provide predictability for safeguarding publicly funded knowledge.
Additionally, universities and federal agencies could adopt portfolio-based governance of intellectual assets, evaluating patent portfolios based on strategic relevance, commercialization potential, and public impact to guide maintenance decisions. This would shift decision-making from reactive to strategic. Although Law 13,243/2016 (Brasil 2016) institutionalized Technological Innovation Centers (NITs), many researchers still struggle to understand their logic.
Major research grants involving patentable technologies or large data infrastructures could require lifecycle budgeting, with multi-year continuity plans and reserved resources for post-project maintenance, ensuring sustainability beyond the funding period. Beyond scientific merit, funding agencies would also assess governance sustainability. Lastly, Brazil could implement a national insurance mechanism for strategic research assets, pooling a small share of competitive funding to cover essential maintenance costs during fiscal distress and distribute continuity risk.
A system that finances creation but neglects preservation risks eroding its achievements. The invisible costs of science link knowledge generation to long-term sovereignty. If Brazil seeks durable scientific autonomy, continuity must be treated as a strategic function of governance.
References
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Edited by
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Handling editor
Alexander Kellner
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