STAR METRICS (Science and Technology for America's Reinvestment: Measuring the EffecT of Research on Innovation, Competitiveness and Science) is a partnership (STAR METRICS Consortium) between

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., federal district, five ma ...

federal science agencies and

research institution A research institute, research centre, research center or research organization, is an establishment founded for doing research. Research institutes may specialize in basic research or may be oriented to applied research. Although the term often im ...

s to document the

return on investment Return on investment (ROI) or return on costs (ROC) is a ratio between net income (over a period) and investment (costs resulting from an investment of some resources at a point in time). A high ROI means the investment's gains compare favourably ...

, research impact, and social outcomes of federally funded

research and development Research and development (R&D or R+D), known in Europe as research and technological development (RTD), is the set of innovative activities undertaken by corporations or governments in developing new services or products, and improving existi ...

. The federal consortium comprises the

White House Office of Science and Technology Policy White is the lightest color and is achromatic (having no hue). It is the color of objects such as snow, chalk, and milk, and is the opposite of black. White objects fully reflect and scatter all the visible wavelengths of light. White o ...

(OSTP), the

National Institutes of Health The National Institutes of Health, commonly referred to as NIH (with each letter pronounced individually), is the primary agency of the United States government The federal government of the United States (U.S. federal government or U ...

(NIH), the

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National ...

, (NSF), the

US Department of Agriculture The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is the federal executive department responsible for developing and executing federal laws related to farming, forestry, rural economic development, and food. It aims to meet the needs of comm ...

, (USDA), and the

US Environmental Protection Agency The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is an independent executive agency of the United States federal government tasked with environmental protection matters. President Richard Nixon proposed the establishment of EPA on July 9, 1970; it be ...

,(EPA). NIH is the host agency for the consortium, which is governed by an Executive Committee and an advisory interagency working group. Dr. Sally Rockey, Deputy Director of Extramural Research, NIH is the Lead Entity Executive for the STAR METRICS consortium. A trademark application has been filed for ""STAR METRICS"" by the US Department of Health and Human Services and is pending with the USPTO. It was announced by OSTP on 28 May 2010 in a press release titled "STAR METRICS: New Way to Measure the Impact of Federally Funded Research".

Pilot

A pilot was undertaken by the following seven institutions in a Federal Demonstration Partnership: *

University of Texas at Austin The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,075 ...

University of Delaware The University of Delaware (colloquially UD or Delaware) is a public land-grant research university located in Newark, Delaware. UD is the largest university in Delaware. It offers three associate's programs, 148 bachelor's programs, 121 m ...

George Mason University George Mason University (George Mason, Mason, or GMU) is a public research university in Fairfax County, Virginia with an independent City of Fairfax, Virginia postal address in the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Area. The university was orig ...

California Institute of Technology The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech or CIT)The university itself only spells its short form as "Caltech"; the institution considers other spellings such a"Cal Tech" and "CalTech" incorrect. The institute is also occasional ...

University of Alabama The University of Alabama (informally known as Alabama, UA, or Bama) is a public research university in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Established in 1820 and opened to students in 1831, the University of Alabama is the oldest and largest of the publi ...

* University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth

History

The imperative for the launch of STAR METRICS was the passing of the

American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) (), nicknamed the Recovery Act, was a stimulus package enacted by the 111th U.S. Congress and signed into law by President Barack Obama in February 2009. Developed in response to the Gr ...

(ARRA), which included a stimulus package for research and development because it was widely believed that investments in science and research would stimulate economic growth. Part of the bill required recipients to report quarterly on

job creation Unemployment, according to the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), is people above a specified age (usually 15) not being in paid employment or self-employment but currently available for work during the refer ...

. The ARRA reporting requirements are distinct from STAR METRICS. The latter was established to provide evidence that investment in research had a positive effect on the economy, because there is little thoroughly conclusive evidence that this is actually the case - even though it is a generally accepted assumption. In 2010 STAR METRICS was given a five-year commitment from agencies, and NIH and NSF committed $1 million combined. Other federal funders that have joined are the

United States Department of Energy The United States Department of Energy (DOE) is an executive department of the U.S. federal government that oversees U.S. national energy policy and manages the research and development of nuclear power and nuclear weapons in the United Stat ...

Environmental Protection Agency A biophysical environment is a biotic and abiotic surrounding of an organism or population, and consequently includes the factors that have an influence in their survival, development, and evolution. A biophysical environment can vary in scale f ...

, and

Department of Agriculture An agriculture ministry (also called an) agriculture department, agriculture board, agriculture council, or agriculture agency, or ministry of rural development) is a ministry charged with agriculture. The ministry is often headed by a minister f ...

. Research institutions voluntarily join the consortium. The formal governance was put in place in January 2012, with NIH hosting the project. The goal of the program was set to develop measures for the impact of federal investments on science, society, the workforce and the economy. To this end, a database was set up of all federally funded researchers and cleaned to ensure no confusions of people with the same or similar names etc. were made. This database was then used to match with other accessible databases such as public records of patents, institutional financial records, payroll data, as well as more traditional scientific output indicators such as

scientific citation Scientific citation is providing detailed reference in a scientific publication, typically a paper or book, to previous published (or occasionally private) communications which have a bearing on the subject of the new publication. The purpose of ...

Outcomes

An attraction of STAR METRICS project was that it would scrape data from existing reports, databases, and the internet for the information it needed, much like the

Lattes Platform The Lattes Platform is an information system (integrated database, web-based query interface, etc.) maintained by the Brazilian federal government to manage information on science, technology, and innovation related to individual researches and in ...

in Brazil. STAR METRICS quickly started tracking job creation from ARRA and non-ARRA research grants at 70 universities, and subsequently moved on to tracking other outcomes of investment in research.

References

External links

* {{official website, https://www.starmetrics.nih.gov/
Amstat News Letter

Working group
Federal Demonstration Partnership
Original website
Great Recession in the United States 2010 in American politics Science policy Research in the United States

Pilot

History

Outcomes

See also

References

External links