British Politics and Policy at LSE – Open data sheds light on how universities are minority providers of commissioned research to government

"Moves towards more transparent and open publication of government data look promising for anyone interested in public policy impacts of research. As we have shown in our recent book The Impact of the Social Sciences, there has been precious little data available that allows us to compare systematically what government spends on commissioning research – in the social sciences and beyond. So the publication of government spending data at Data.gov.uk has been an important step forward. For the first time, public policy watchers can begin to compile a much more complete (and comparable) picture of the different channels through which government gets its knowledge (and what it pays for it). Towards the end of last year, I began collecting systematically one year’s worth of spending data for each UK central government department (generally from July 2012 to June 2013). In total, more than 755,000 expenditure entries listed basic details about the spending department, date, amount, recipient organization, and brief details about what the expenditure was for. Using a combination of automated word look-up techniques and many hours of manual sorting, interpreting and coding, it was possible to get to a full dataset of expenditure items. Clearly, this comes with a health warning, in that we cannot be completely sure of its comprehensiveness given inevitable inconsistencies in way in which departments have reported data. It is however a start. With the variables listed above, I estimated how much each department has spent on research and technical advice from external organizations (see Figure 1 below). This includes all types of research – not just the social sciences. And it includes only the direct spending by the departments, and not the policy sector as a whole. For example, data for the Department of Health does not include research spending by the NHS, just as spending by the Department for Communities and Local Government does not include spending by local authorities ..."