r&d

A recent Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) memorandum instructs major federal research agencies to provide open access to federally funded research and digital scientific data. All federal agencies with an extramural research budget that exceeds $100 million will participate, following the example of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which implemented a similar policy in 2008. Over the next six months, these agencies will draft plans to ensure that any results of federal research published in peer-reviewed scholarly publications are available to the public.

The sixth installment of SSTI's Tech Talkin' Govs series includes excerpts from speeches delivered in New Hampshire and North Carolina. Our first five installments were in the Jan. 9, Jan. 16, Jan. 23, Jan.

In his fifth State of the Union address, President Obama announced education and immigration reform as core issues for his second term and laid out a plan for innovation and job creation policies that would be fundamental drivers for broad-based, long-term economic growth. While acknowledging the need for entitlement reform and deficit reduction, President Obama held firm in his conviction that public investment is necessary to ensure that the United States remains an economic superpower in the 21st century.

Four have made it to the final round of the EU's Future and Emerging Technologies Flagships program in which 26 projects submitted proposals for funding. Each project is set to receive approximately $72 million from the EU's research budget that will be matched by national governments and other sources. If milestones are met within the first 30 months, the awards could total upwards of $1.33 billion each over the next decade.

DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the Semiconductor Research Corporation have announced a five-year $194 million program working with six universities across the country to support the growth of the semiconductor industry. These research centers are:

According to a new brief from the National Science Foundation (NSF), preliminary 2011 data indicates that U.S. total research and development (R&D) in 2011 was $414.0 billion (in current dollars), an increase of $7.3 billion from 2010 totals ($406.7 billion). These results mark the second straight year of growth in U.S. R&D expenditures following a $1.8 billion decline in 2009 — only the second decline in current dollars since the early 1950s.

In 2012, the tech industry lobby substantially ramped up their efforts to influence the federal legislative agenda. In the coming year, they are poised to grow their influence in Washington as debates rage over the future of technology investment programs and regulatory policies.

Early January 2nd, President Obama signed the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 (AFTA) into law after it passed in the House by a 90-vote margin the previous evening. While the deal postponed difficult decisions concerning spending cuts and long-term debt reduction measures by delaying the FY13 sequester until March 1, 2013, AFTA averted steep, across-the-board spending cuts and tax hikes set to take place at the beginning of the year.

In the face of the spiraling unemployment in Greece and Spain, the European Union (EU) received encouraging news regarding the economic recovery of firms across its 27-member states.

In FY11, the top 30 U.S. research universities accounted for over 40 percent (approximately $26.1 billion) of total academic R&D spending in 2011, according to survey data collected by the National Science Foundation. The other 882 universities surveyed accounted for approximately $39 billion of the total academic R&D spending for the 2011 fiscal year (approximately $65.1B billion). The Higher Education Research and Development Survey population also increased from 742 universities in 2010 to 912 in 2011.