Editor’s Note: Today’s post is by Hilary Craiglow. Hilary leads library consulting at Attain Partners, a higher education consulting firm. In her role, she oversees the Library Cost Study and is undertaking a review of its methodology and implementation procedures.  

The federal government is rightly mandating that the knowledge and data produced from federal grants be widely available for our collective good. Despite the heroic efforts of the scholarly communication community, we remain under-resourced to make this happen. Let’s add some new metrics and language to this narrative to help articulate the value of libraries.

Within this community, there is an imperative, there is a will, and there is expertise to make scholarship and data, especially federally sponsored research, more accessible. But we remain challenged to turn the will and expertise into dollars to support the work. Federal research dollars continue to flow to universities but there are few budget increases to the libraries that make the resulting research accessible. To make the long-lived open scholarship work of research libraries more legible to university administrators and demonstrate that libraries are more than buildings for study, gathering, and warehousing, we can show impact in quantifiable and financial terms. We can gather and analyze data on a library’s impact on sponsored research itself. We can do this by conducting studies on the purpose of library use and tying that information to library expenses.

Federal Research Dollars to Universities

In November, the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES) released a brief outlying Government R&D Expenditures at U.S. Universities Increased by $8 Billion in FY 2022. University spending on R&D totaled $97.8 Billion in 2022. University research funds come from multiple sources, federal, state, and local agencies, businesses, non-profits, and other revenues from within the institution. According to the NCSES data, expenditures of federal research funding at U.S. institutions of higher education have increased 26% since 2012. Even with rumblings that federal R&D funding will decrease, this is a striking reminder of how the federal government relies on universities to help solve our most pressing problems.

Library Support for Research Grants

Universities understand how integral the library is to this research enterprise. At a high level, research libraries support PIs and research teams all along the research lifecycle through

• Access to Data, Resources & Specialized Collections
• Statistical Tools and Software
• Research Methods and Skills
• Proposal Development & Grant Support
• Data Curation and Management
• Reference and Citation Management
• Copyright and Intellectual Property Expertise
• Digital Publishing
• Archiving and Preservation

And Contemplative and Collaborative Spaces

Indirect Cost Recovery for Sponsored Research

Tangible evidence of a university’s recognition of the library’s support of sponsored research is embedded in a university’s Facility and Administrative (F&A) rate. This is the rate universities negotiate with the federal government to recover overhead costs that support research activities.  Depending on multiple factors, a university’s indirect cost recovery on federal grants and contracts ranges between 25 and 33 percent. For example, if a scientist receives an award for $100,000, and the institution’s F&A rate is 50 percent, the amount of the award given to the organization is $150,000. So, $100,000 is for the direct costs needed for the scientist to conduct the research and the $50,000 is for the reimbursement of overhead costs that support the research.  In this scenario, $50,000 represents 33 percent of the total award. Within the 50 percent F&A rate, the library component (i.e., facility) usually accounts for 1 to 3 of those points. To translate, for every $100 Million in federal grant funding received, one point equals $1 Million in recovery costs. To do a back-of-the-envelope calculation for any given institution, federal grant dollars by institution can be found in a variety of places, including the Higher Education Research and Development (HERD) Survey.

The library is a central component, one of just five components, in the Facilities portion of an F&A rate proposal. The other overhead costs include the depreciation on the building and equipment, interest expense, and operations and maintenance costs (utilities, maintenance and repairs, environmental health and safety, security, etc.).

Positioned within “Facilities”, the federal government has yet to recognize the depth and breadth of research libraries and their dynamic role in support of the research enterprise. From the perspective of university finance, libraries remain a facility. Further, for many university libraries, the library contribution to an F&A rate is proposed, negotiated, and recovered with little involvement or even knowledge by the library.

Library Budgets and University Revenues

Over the past ten years, Carnegie Doctoral Institutions with Very High Research Activity (R1) have received a significant portion of federal grant dollars. Although the unusual infusion of COVID research dollars will skew trends for years, on average, university revenues from all funding sources, have increased over the past ten years.

During the same period of growth in university revenues, much attributed to R&D dollars, university investments in their libraries has remained around 1% of revenue. In good news, through unpredictable fluctuations in university revenues, an ARL library budget remains consistent. Unfortunately, with continuing cost increases, a flat library budget is an erosion in purchasing power. Without new investments, or substantial resource redistribution, we cannot make progress on new mandates for open data and scholarship.

Research Libraries and U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB)

The federal government continues its flow of funds to universities to discover new knowledge and is mandating transparency in their research and output. The Nelson Memo makes clear and accelerates the open scholarship work research libraries have been conducting for decades. Many thanks to this community and university library leaders who tirelessly underscore this work (ACRL/ARL and Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation) and remind us of the necessary resources to make sponsored research and data open. Libraries have been at the forefront and are fundamental in distributing and providing access to the data and knowledge results of sponsored research. Yet, libraries are not receiving new funding to respond to the mandate. Interestingly, however, the expenses of running a library facility are recognized as an essential cost of conducting sponsored research.

Academic research communities are justly taking a closer look at how the government considers libraries in the indirect cost recovery process, a process governed by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and outlined in 2 CFR Part 200. There have been some the efforts, for example the comment letters from COGR and ARL, to reposition the research library in a 21st-century light. Notwithstanding these efforts, the federal government made no changes to the library treatment in recent updates to the indirect cost recovery process. Rather, recent changes were intended to decrease burdens on recipients, advance equity, and job growth, improve administrative assistance, and write the code in more plain language.

On the bright side, facilities expenses are uncapped. Uncapped expenses provide universities, and perhaps libraries, with more opportunities to increase their recovery of the costs to support their sponsored research activities.

Making the Library Ledger More Legible

In addition to quantifying the cost of the library facility, imagine what we could accomplish if we articulate in financial terms the impact libraries make all along the research lifecycle. We can find new, different, and effective ways to communicate the financial benefits, monetary support, and economic impact libraries provide to the university, especially the research enterprise. Doing so has the potential to increase library funding, help universities articulate the value they provide, and explain the rising expense of higher education.

Libraries can start by better incorporating our support for sponsored research into grant proposals. They can partner with investigators to develop data management and sharing plans and ensure library contributions are captured on a project-by-project basis. And we can collect data on how PIs utilize the library for their grant work. A library purpose-of-use study identifies researcher interaction and utilization of libraries at the point of use. Through a use study, they can tie library costs of providing library services, data, and tools to sponsored research use and work with and support university finance offices as they incorporate library costs into their F&A proposals. Publishers may have no direct role in supporting such a study, but they should be aware of the importance and value of such work in supporting the library’s budget case.

Libraries and publishers can also support the work of the Realities of Academic Research Sharing (RADS) Initiativewhich is diligently making progress on understanding the costs of implementing federally mandated public access to data. We should all be excited to see progress on their insights and recommendations (here is a recent peek).

Inevitably, with a pecuniary articulation of library support on campus, particularly support of sponsored research, we will further demonstrate the knowledge and authority of the library and open publishing community to continue our work and its true value: to help solve our most pressing problems.