The enduring pursuit of public science at U.S. land-grant universities.

Ana Paula Melo,Jeremy Foltz,Joshua L Rosenbloom,Bradford Barham

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0259997

Abstract

Since the 1990s, universities have faced a push toward output commercialization that has been seen as a potential threat to the public science model. Much less attention has been given to the enduring nature of internal organizational features in academia and how they shape the pursuit of traditional scholarly activities. This article exploits four waves of representative, random-sample survey evidence from agricultural and life science faculty at the 52 major U.S. land-grant universities, spanning 1989-2015, to examine faculty attitudes/preferences, tenure and promotion criteria, output, and funding sources. Our findings demonstrate that faculty attitudes toward scientific research have remained remarkably stable over twenty-five years in strongly favoring intrinsic and public science goals over commercial or extrinsic goals. We also demonstrate the faculty's positive attitudes toward science, an increased pressure to publish in top journals and secure increasingly competitive grants, as well as declining time for science. These trends suggest a reconsideration of university commercialization strategies and a recommitment of universities and their state and federal funders toward fostering public agricultural and life science research.

Highlights

Much ado has been made about potential changes in faculty scholarly activities at public universities in the United States [1,2,3] and globally [4,5,6,7]
Two factors internal to U.S Land-grant universities (LGUs) that appear key in shaping this outcome are (i) faculty preferences for research-problem choice based on intrinsic factors, and (ii) tenure and promotion incentives that highly reward articles and grants, along with instructional evaluations
LGU faculty’s enduring commitment to peer-reviewed research activities, especially articles and grants, as well as to graduate training and other instructional activities, appears to rest on a robust combination of attitudes, tenure and promotion incentives, and increasingly competitive research grant awards, all of which privilege traditional academic scholarship, rather than commercialization. This finding stands in strong contrast to concerns regarding a major erosion in the public science model associated with academic commercialization or other budgetary pressures on public universities

Summary

Introduction

Much ado has been made about potential changes in faculty scholarly activities at public universities in the United States [1,2,3] and globally [4,5,6,7]. Some authors raise concerns about external incentives that might pull faculty away from public science toward commercialization and intellectual property (IP) right creation and protection [8,9,10,11]. This article examines how a broader set of scholarly activities have evolved over time at all 52 original 1862 U.S Land-grant universities (LGUs) using representative random-sample survey data from agricultural and life science faculty, spanning 26 years from 1989 to 2015.

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Results

Discussion

Conclusion