IRIS | Institute for Research on Innovation and Science

Due to the coronavirus outbreak, the IRIS team will be working remotely for the near future. We are reachable through email and phone, as listed on our staff page.

IRIS is… a national consortium of research universities organized around an IRS-approved data repository. We develop data for research and reporting to understand, explain and improve the public value of research and higher education.

IRIS Analysis: Universities spent $14 billion on
research-related goods and services in fiscal years 2018-2019
An analysis of IRIS data based on detailed vendor information from our members, representing more than 41% of U.S. university research spending, found that universities spent approximately $14 billion on research-related goods and services in all 435 congressional districts.
The report has been included in a Dear Colleague letter being circulated by U.S. Reps. Fred Upton (R-MI) and Diana DeGette (D-CO), with 182 co-signers.
See the IRIS report
Read the Dear Colleague letter
Call to Action from Research!America
...a national consortium of research universities organized around an IRB-approved data repository. IRIS develops data for research and reporting to understand, explain and improve the public value of research and higher education.
IRIS is...
View this webinar from Feb. 2020 to learn more about IRIS from Executive Director Jason Owen-Smith
Linked with data from the U.S. Census Bureau and other sources, the data show that at IRIS member institutions:
• 43% of research-trained employees remained in the state in which they were trained for their first outside job
• students (graduate and undergraduate) make up 22% of all employees on funded projects
• vendors on sponsored research projects pay an average of $62,000 per year, $13,000 above national average.
The IRIS-UMETRICS Dataset
Our 2019 data release contains information on approximately:
• 400,000 funded research awards
• 650,000 research employees
• $85 billion in award spending
• $61 billion in vendor and subaward spending.
Explore interactive IRIS data reports
Our annual summit, which integrates discussions on data products that tell the story of academia's public value; research questions; and using and improving the IRIS data infrastructure, took place Sept. 26-27 in Ann Arbor.
The 2019 IRIS Summit
Learn more
IRIS Membership
See Who Belongs
IRIS data are useful for answering myriad questions about the social and
economic effects of research investments. Examples of possible topics include:

• the scientific production function
• the career outcomes and earnings of doctoral students and trainees
• questions pertaining to science and engineering workforce and the STEM pipeline
• entrepreneurial outcomes and human capital
• the economic effects of research related to food safety
• the relationship between research funding and subsequent entrepreneurship
• and many more topics
Research Using IRIS Data
Learn More
Campus-level reports constructed from an individual university’s data provide
resources for use in research reports, as well as presentations to the
public and other stakeholders. In addition, routine reports from IRIS data
improve administrators’ knowledge about the size and composition of the
research workforce on campus, the portfolio of federally funded research, and
the distribution of people supported by different funders.
Reports and Products
Learn More

UNIVERSITIES

Provide and Use the Data

IRIS provides member institutions with university-specific reports based on their data, highlighting the impacts of their research efforts and investments.

Membership

RESEARCHERS

Refine the Data

IRIS creates a secure data enclave for the research community by collecting, integrating, warehousing, and making large-scale data accessible to researchers.

Details

POLICY MAKERS

Leverage the Data

IRIS provides policy makers with credible data on the value of research to address pressing social science and policy questions.

Products

“…Efforts to synthesize data would benefit from the empirical infrastructure built since 2015 by the Institute for Research on Innovation and Science (IRIS), which provides a platform for linking university administrative records with U.S. Census data, as well as administrative data with other databases, including patents and publications… Given the promising nature of the IRIS system, the committee strongly urges that research institutions join the IRIS initiative.”

—NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES CONSENSUS STUDY REPORT, “THE NEXT GENERATION OF BIOMEDICAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE RESEARCHERS: BREAKING THROUGH” (2018)

“This groundbreaking project will allow research universities to better track and report the outcomes of many dimensions of the academic enterprise. Perhaps most importantly, the effort will apply the protocols and rigor of academic research to the work and outcomes of higher education—and will do so in a manner consistent with the values of the academic (not commercial) sector.”

—BARBARA MCFADDEN ALLEN, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, BIG TEN ACADEMIC ALLIANCE

“IRIS data allow observational experiments that can directly test this people-centric model by tracking how scientific training affects career trajectories and returns to industry. Preliminary IRIS data indicate, for example, that a science doctorate improves a person’s chances of entering a high-tech industry, which will result in higher wages and greater productivity.”

—MICHAEL EINSTEIN, “ASSESSMENT: ACADEMIC RETURN,” NATURE 5 MAY 2016, VOL 533, p. S21

“My congressional representative asked me about output measures of Ohio State research. Was that research making an impact and how did we measure it? … I find the IRIS data increasingly useful for discussions about the value of research.”

—CAROLINE C. WHITACRE, VP FOR RESEARCH, OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY

“AAU universities conduct a majority of the federally funded university research, contributing to U.S. economic competitiveness, health, and national security. Now, with the help of IRIS, universities can better understand and demonstrate the impacts of research to their students, local community, and nation.”

– MARY SUE COLEMAN, PRESIDENT, ASSOCIATION OF AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES

INTERESTED IN JOINING IRIS? Visit our Membership page for details on how to get started.

NEWS

IRIS fact sheet cited in Science Policy Forum article

A recent IRIS fact sheet titled "The Impact of American University Research Spending" was cited in an article in the Policy Forum section of Science magazine. The piece, co-written by authors from the University of Michigan, Stanford University, Johns Hopkins...

Jake Fisher and Yajuan Si win MIDAS grant for COVID-19 project

Jake Fisher, Research Investigator at IRIS, and Yajuan Si, Research Assistant Professor in the Survey Methodology Program, have been awarded funding under the Michigan Institute for Data Science’s COVID-19 grant program. Their proposal, titled “Estimating county-level...

about 9 hours agoComing soon: our 4th annual data release, from IRIS members accounting for 41% of U.S. university R&D spending. Dat… https://t.co/xb29ZPeuxR
about 3 days agoGreat to see IRIS data cited this way! Here's our recent fact sheet on the impact of research spending nationwide:… https://t.co/5ACpTvo9fn
about 1 week agoHappening today! https://t.co/nJGkPr6jec

MORE TWEETS

Current Members

Already a member? Upload your files to our data ingest portal, or log in to view your custom reports.

DATA PORTAL

Institute for Research on Innovation and Science
University of Michigan
Institute for Social Research
Survey Research Center
330 Packard St, 2354 Perry Bldg
Ann Arbor, MI, 48104-2910

P: (734) 615-0015
F: (734) 763-3862
IRIS-info@umich.edu
iris.isr.umich.edu
@IRIS_UMETRICS / #irisumetrics