Thank you for being a member of IRIS! This page contains resources and links to help you:

• submit data to IRIS
• promote IRIS to researchers on your campus
• access IRIS research data
• access campus-specific reports produced by IRIS from your data.

Many of these issues are addressed in the Membership Guide.

Submitting data

Members are asked to submit data to IRIS every year on April 15 and October 15.

New members typically attend a webinar with IRIS staff to review the procedures for their initial submission of data, which we anticipate will take approximately 40 hours of work to prepare. Subsequent years’ submissions usually require significantly less work. If you need to consult with IRIS staff, please contact IRIS-info@umich.edu.

Accessing data

One of the benefits of membership is free access to the IRIS dataset for all researchers on your campus. The dataset contains information on nearly 400,000 research grants, $84 billion in research spending, wages for approximately 650,000 employees, and payments to about 821,000 vendors.

Approximately 120 researchers from around the country have accessed the dataset for their research in fields including sociology, complex systems, industrial operations and engineering, and finance.

Detailed information on how to access the data can be found on our Data Access page.

Promoting IRIS data

To raise awareness of the availability of the IRIS dataset, we encourage all members to distribute announcements to relevant departments and institutes via on-campus communications channels.

We have developed a new member internal announcement that may be useful in this type of outreach.

IRIS reports

Another benefit of membership is access to university-specific reports produced by IRIS that shed light on the career pathways of research-trained employees and the economic impacts of research-related spending.

Depending on the data your university submit to IRIS, you will have access to some or all of the following reports:

• Employment Report — presents data on employment and earnings of research-trained employees, allowing institutions to track the flow of people into the economy.
• Vendor Profile Report — contains information on the companies providing research-related goods and services.
• Spending Report — focuses on sponsored research spending at your institution.
• Congressional and State Legislative Fact Sheets — provides an overview of spending by congressional or state legislative districts for government relations purposes.
• ImpactFinder — an interactive tool to identify research vendors selected by location, funding agency, or project topic.

Examples of some of these reports can be found on our Reports & Products page. You can access your university’s reports via the Member Portal.

You can also view a downloadable summary of IRIS reports.

Use Cases

Universities use IRIS reports for a variety of purposes, including government relations, internal planning, and public relations. Download some examples for more information, or see our Use Cases page.