Improving the Accessibility of Federal Graduate Research Awards in Canada

Canadian federal graduate research awards provide graduate students with support that impacts both their experience during their degree and their future career progression. Obtaining federal funding during graduate education qualifies students for additional awards, provides financial security, and increases their research independence. However, the number and value of awards have remained unchanged for almost two decades and the evaluation and eligibility criteria are not designed to encourage applications from students from historically underrepresented groups (URGs). The three federal research funding agencies (the Tri-Agency) have recently released an Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) Action Plan to better support early-career individuals from these groups, with a commitment to “identify and address barriers to equitable participation of members from underrepresented groups” (Initiative 1.2.2) and increase participation of URGs in the post-secondary research system (Objective 2). In this memo, we propose three changes to broaden the eligibility and evaluation of federal student awards, as well as increase and standardize the award values. Ultimately, these recommendations will reduce the barriers faced by URGs in applying for and obtaining these awards in a manner not currently addressed by the Tri-Agency’s EDI plan.

University Innovation and Local Economic Growth

This paper identifies the extent to which knowledge from U.S. universities drives industry agglomeration. Establishment-level data indicate faster growth in employment, wages, and corporate innovation after the Bayh-Dole Act's shock to the spread of innovation from universities in industries more closely related to the nearby university's innovative strengths. Federal research funding amplified the effect. University knowledge spillovers strengthen with geographic proximity, density, and local skills. Consistent with spatial equilibrium models, the growth effect is driven by nearby entry in university-linked industries, especially of multi-unit expansions; these firms disproportionately partner with universities in R&D, transfer IP, and innovate.

Who’s writing open access (OA) articles? Characteristics of OA authors at Ph.D.-granting institutions in the United States

The open access (OA) publication movement aims to present research literature to the public at no cost and with no restrictions. While the democratization of access to scholarly literature is a primary focus of the movement, it remains unclear whether OA has uniformly democratized the corpus of freely available research, or whether authors who choose to publish in OA venues represent a particular subset of scholars—those with access to resources enabling them to afford article processing charges (APCs). We investigated the number of OA articles with article processing charges (APC OA) authored by 182,320 scholars with known demographic and institutional characteristics at American research universities across 11 broad fields of study. The results show, in general, that the likelihood for a scholar to author an APC OA article increases with male gender, employment at a prestigious institution (AAU member universities), association with a STEM discipline, greater federal research funding, and more advanced career stage (i.e., higher professorial rank). Participation in APC OA publishing appears to be skewed toward scholars with greater access to resources and job security.

Digital Health for the Opioid Crisis: Funding the Future (Preprint)

UNSTRUCTURED The opioid crisis is ravaging economies and communities across the United States. Technology has the potential to end this crisis. Digital health offers new ways to reach, diagnose, and treat individuals with opioid use disorders. Federal research funding tends to reflect the nation’s research priorities and shape the direction of innovation. We reviewed funded projects by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) from 2013 to 2017, a period leading to the substantial increase in federal funding and the launch of the HEAL (Helping End Addiction Long-TermSM) initiative in 2018. We presented our viewpoint of the research landscape of the digital health development for the opioid crisis. Overall, there was a gradual increase in NIDA grant funding for technology in the opioid crisis and the percentage of NIDA technology awards funding new projects has nearly doubled. More specifically, we discuss the types of applications and potential challenges in five emerging technology categories: electronic health, mobile health, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and biosensor. Diversification of funding in these categories offers the promise of more innovation in new technologies to combat the opioid epidemic.

Perinatal mental health around the world: priorities for research and service development in the USA

The perinatal mental health field is growing rapidly, which has yielded innovations in both prevention and treatment. To realise the potential of these innovations to transform clinical practice, further investment in research and clinical service development is required. Clinical services must be expanded by providing increased access to specialty care and education for front-line clinicians. Research is needed to develop a personalised medicine approach to understanding the complex aetiologies of perinatal depression and optimising treatments to promote both remission and long-term recovery. Such initiatives will require policies to prioritise federal research funding and healthcare coverage for perinatal depression.