Collaboration surges as businesses outsource discovery to academia

New data from the Nature Index show that as corporations have scaled back their own in-house research, there has been a surge in collaboration withacademic and government research bodies, as they look to share the burden of scientific discovery. These findings are featured in the Nature Index 2017 Science Inc. supplement, published today, which investigates corporate institutions’ changing role in science, how the academic research landscape is evolving as a result, and the costs and benefits of these shifting arrangements to high-quality research Previous research has shown that the long-term decline in corporate scientific output – evident across every industrial sector, from electronics to telecommunications to pharmaceutical industry – has coincided with a reducing investment in research. Between 1980 and 2006, the share of corporate investment in basic and applied research in the United States, as a proportion of total research and development funding, shrank from 26% to 22%. According to researchers at Duke University, in 1980 the average US corporation published 29 papers a year in the Web of Science database, but by 2006 this had fallen to 12 papers. However, while overall corporate research output has declined, data from the Nature Index show that the number of partnerships between businesses and academic or government institutions in the index has more than doubled over the past five years, from 12,672 connections in 2012 to 25,962 in 2016. Over the same perio...
Source: News from STM - Category: Databases & Libraries Authors: Tags: Featured World Source Type: news