On 30 Jun 2005, at 22:43, Tim Gray, Libray Assistant, Homerton
College, Cambridge wrote:
Incidentally, what percentage of all UK peer-reviewed research is
funded by
RCUK? Would this percentage then be the percentage of *all* peer-
reviwed UK
research available via OA funded post 1st October 2005 (the
proposed start
date)? Is there a large number of other funders of peer-reviewed
research -
but not necessarily mandating an OA policy?
I calculated this roughly (about 6 months ago) for a journalist.
RCUK provided about 2.1 billion UK pounds (in 2003/4).
Then there's research infrastructure funding across the UK which adds
up to £1.4bn in 2004-5.
Independent (chariites) then add perhaps another £0.7bn.
In other words, the RCUK money is exactly half!
What follows is the justification for my figures. You will notice
that ther is a big hole in terms of EU and DTI funding, but I finesse
that by claiming that the money is for "near to market" purposes and
not "real research".
EVIDENCE-------------------
(a) From "Funding higher education in England: How HEFCE allocates
its funds", http://www.hefce.ac.uk/Pubs/hefce/2004/04_23/04_23.pdf
Public research funds are provided under a dual support system. HEFCE
provides funding to support the research infrastructure. Our funds
go towards the cost of the salaries of permanent academic staff,
premises, libraries and central computing costs. The Research
Councils provide for direct project costs and contribute to indirect
project costs. Our funding for research in 2004-05 is £1,081 million
The funding mechanisms and processes are similar in Scotland, Wales.
Only the figures differ (below).
(b) From SHEFC Media release PRHE/02/04 (17 March 2004), http://
www.shefc.ac.uk/library/06854fc203db2fbd000000fb39b63691/prhe0204.html
Scottish higher education institutions (HEIs) will receive more than
£800 million SHEFC funding [ this is mixed teaching and research
headings of which about 230million seems to be equivalent to the
English headings ]
(c) From HEFCW Circular W04/18HE - Recurrent Grant 2004-05, http://
www.elwa.org.uk/elwaweb/doc_bin/he%20circulars/w0418he%20recurrent%
20grant%202004_05.pdf
In Table 4, total research allocations appear to be about £61 million
pounds.
I cannot find any figures for Northern Ireland - lets assume the same
as Wales.
----------------------
Other (Govt) funding resources?
=========================
There's DTI, MOD and EU which provide significant sums of money, but
they are more along the D spectrum of R&D. Of course we take their
money and try to turn it into a research activity (often without
their knowledge) but this still could reasonably be missed off a true
"blue sky, journal publishing" scenario. Basically I'm stalling cos I
don't have a clue how to find out these numbers, much less to divide
them between Universities and Business :-)
Other charitable research funding organisations:
======================================
Each organisation is listed with its latest declared annual funding
figures.
Leverhulme: £20million
Nuffield: about £9 million
Rowntree: about £5 million
Wellcome Trust (Biomedical/medicine): £400million
(however, the Wellcome Trust is one of 111 charities that form the
AMRC who had a combined spend of £660M on a wide range of medical and
health research activities in the UK in 2002/03.)
Royal Society, British Council etc provide fellowships and bursaries
but no direct research project grants.
---
Les Carr
