Second Annual IRIS Data Release Now Available
May 21, 2018
ANN ARBOR—The Institute for Research on Innovation & Science (IRIS) is pleased to announce the second annual IRIS research data release is now available.
The IRIS dataset is a result of an unprecedented collaboration between the U.S. Census Bureau and more than thirty public and private universities. In 2015, the United States invested $214 in academic research for every man, woman, and child in the country. How the impacts of that investment can be traced through the economy is not always clear. Founded in 2015, the mission of IRIS is to support independent, frontier research on science and innovation in the service of the public interest. IRIS collects administrative data from top R&D performing universities and is working to develop a robust dataset through which one can explore, map and quantify how federal funding for research channeled through universities impacts the economy down to the local level. In addition to creating specialized reports for IRIS member universities, IRIS facilitates research by an expanding user base in fields including sociology, agriculture, economics, public administration, and business by making available an annual research data release.
Researchers have already used IRIS data to examine how federally funded research yields safer and more secure food systems, to measure gender differences in graduate studies and early career pathways within STEM fields, and to measure how university innovations contribute to regional economic growth. Since the first data release last year, the number of researchers has grown from the founding PIs and their research teams to more than 48 active users spanning 18 institutions.
The April 2018 data release includes transactions from about 300,000 unique awards including wage payments to 480,000 individuals as well as transactions to organizations and individuals for goods and services totaling $27.2 billion. With each new data release, IRIS adds new member university data, with the ultimate goal of engaging 150 universities that collectively account for over 93% of Federal Research & Development expenditures for academic research in the United States. Executive Director Jason Owen-Smith and his team at IRIS are excited to help find new stories the data has to tell, and encourage researchers to apply for access to the IRIS data by submitting a research proposal on the IRIS website: http://iris.isr.umich.edu/research-data/access/.
Contact: Catherine Allen-West [email protected]