Building Community and a New Data Infrastructure for Science Policy

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This project creates and maintains infrastructure and community to support policy relevant social science research. It uses newly available STAR METRICS data on how universities spend federal research grants to examine the scientific, social and economic impact of federally funded academic research. Infrastructure includes shared research tools and datasets. The community spans researchers in multiple disciplines, academic administrators, and state and federal policy makers. Employing STAR METRICS data and utilizing infrastructure for its access and use the research community can provide systematic answers to questions such as: What scientific collaborations are directly supported by research funding? What indirect effects do federal grants exert on regional economies and labor markets? The first question can be answered with systematic study of the structure and productivity of scientific collaboration networks using fine-grained information on who is paid to work on the same scientific grants. In doing so, this project is the first to characterize the productivity of campus-wide, federally funded science on 11 large university campuses. The second question can be answered using the same data source to analyze payments to vendors for scientific equipment, supplies, etc. By analyzing the distribution, geographic location, and industry of vendors that supply federally funded research, this project offers the first comprehensive picture of the effects of federal R&D spending on economic resilience and job creation via companies that support university research. These and other community research endeavors provide compelling cases for large scale, sustained research to assess the US science ecosystem and the full public value of federal support for scientific research. Broader impacts. The community and infrastructure developed by this project support a range of ongoing research projects; the results are of immediate interest to policy makers and academic administrators. Insights derived from this research can inform the allocation of resources on campus, decisions about how to pursue cutting edge scientific research and even the design and allocation of space in research facilities. At the national and state level, this project contributes to the development of a rigorous science of science policy that can inform decisions about how to allocate public resources for R&D by providing systematic evidence about the productivity of different approaches to organizing research and the larger social and economic results of discovery and learning on research university campuses.