Trends in Academic Research Spending, Alliances, and Commercialization

Widespread changes underway in the national R&D landscape are impacting how universities fund, conduct, and disseminate their own research efforts. The key components of these trends are revealed through a variety of indicators, including on financial resources, publishing and patenting metrics, and research partnerships. Many of the changes appear to be cost-driven. Particularly as funding increases from Government have slowed and expectations for cost-sharing increased during the past decade, universities increasingly have come to rely on nonfederal sources, notably industry and institutional self-funding. The shift in funding sources has impacted all major fields of study. As part of this system-wide transformation, universities have noticeably increased their collaborations with nonacademic researchers as evidenced by trends in publication data and information on the formation of centers, consortia, and cooperative agreements. Concurrently, and not coincidentally, the transfer of universities' research output also is expanding. Such transfers are increasing both indirectly (as indicated from patenting citation data) and directly (as documented by universities' own patenting/licensing commercialization endeavors). On all accounts are we unlikely to have yet reached the peak of such activities.