Executive Summary

MASC Editors
2012 Merrill Series on The Research Mission of Public Universities  
Data come at us rapidly from nearly every quarter and demand to be analyzed. High speed, high capacity computers, blindingly fast networks and massive storage capacity, huge quantities of digitally searchable text and considerable expertise will be required to deal with it all. And finally, it must be affordable. Can public universities afford to compete in this future? • Public universities operate at a distinct disadvantage relative to our competitors in both private universities and in the
more » ... rporate world. Public universities' major patrons, the 50 states, have been defunding them on a per student basis for last three decades. • How do we as public universities acquire (or acquire access to) the information infrastructure that will enable us to maintain or improve our position in research, especially funded research, despite our financial weakness? • What I recommend is that public universities promote the development of mechanisms and patterns of thought and behavior that enable sharing among all actors of the information infrastructure vital to the research enterprise. • Elias Zerhouni's vision of the ideal future of medical research involved building the systems in which all research studies were placed freely available on-line. The scientific literature, genome, tissue and whole organism data sets and repositories and the research data bases that grew from his vision at NIH are precisely the kind of publicly available resources that enable public universities to compete and also permit all researchers, wherever they are housed, to be more productive. • The information infrastructure required to compete in the research environment of the next decades will be less affordable to public research universities than to others because of their financial disadvantages. They would therefore differentially benefit if information infrastructure were made publically available to all without regard to financial factors. • The rate of advancement in our markets is accelerating today. Over the last twenty-five years, the primary seat of innovation and discovery have shifted from industrial laboratories to major, research-intensive universities, and hence social expectations are shifting to universities to lead future advances in technology commercialization that will preserve and extend the United States' international competitiveness. All advances in technology trigger creative disruption of pre-existing market structures, and universities are not historically good at managing such disruption.
doi:10.17161/merrill.2012.7854 fatcat:26n2xzmhyvgxvnest2vftrpsgm