Operational and Fiscal Management of Core Facilities A Survey of Chief Research Officers - Carter *et al.*

This resource first appeared in issue #20 on 17 Apr 2020 and has tags Strategy: Product/Service Management, Strategy: Working with Decision Makers

Operational and Fiscal Management of Core Facilities: A Survey of Chief Research Officers - Carter et al.

A lot of people who work in research are unaware of the fact that there’s a lot of research about research, how it’s done, how it’s funded, what seems to work and what doesn’t. A lot of that research is necessarily qualitative, not quantitative, which initially seems wishy-washy to STEM-trained folks, but those methods can be just as rigorous and are solid practice for getting insight into most systems involving people.

This paper gathers information from 58 “chief research officers” (so Vice Presidents Research, Provosts, Vice Chancellors Research, etc.) at research institutions and asks about their core facilities for research - six common ones were microscopy/imaging centres, animal labs, HPC centres, microanalytic centres, fabrication centres/machine shops, aquatic cores, and agricultural cores. Not there are bioinformatics cores or software development teams, which are probably still too new to be common.

What’s interesting is how common the issues are across these very different kinds of centres - the breakdown of funding (internal/external user fees vs institutional funding vs grants), the operations, and the focus on equipment over people (ugh). Across all types of cores, there was statistically significantly differences between how effective they were when run by professional staff vs by tenure-track faculty (ahem). It’s also worth knowing that in general the CROs would narrowly prefer to contact out these services if possible (except for animal care).