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The Excellence Initiative poured several billion dollars into German higher education, intended to change the behavior of research faculty. That’s tougher to do than was expected.

German professors have traditionally enjoyed a privileged position in academe and society, and are largely free to decide what research to pursue and how much to teach. Mr. Flink and his colleagues surveyed thousands of professors about what defines their daily work lives. More than 90 percent of the respondents said their focus was decided primarily by their own interests, some 40 percent cited discussions in the wider scientific community, and just 5 percent said that the university president had any role.

"I was shaken by the result," says Mr. Flink. He says it demonstrates that the Excellence Initiative, for all its emphasis on institutional strategies, has had little impact on how academics function.

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If charges that traditional publishing slows research are true, what responsibility do research institutions have to encourage or provide alternative publishing methods? Is this another area of disruption where institutions could possible take something back?

 A group called the Public Knowledge Project says its free online publishing software has allowed more than 5,000 new academic journals to be published. And there are lots of groups and projects like this one. In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Peter Schmidt writes:

In a world where subscriptions to some medical journals can cost more than $10,000 a year, and many colleges in developing countries cannot afford more than a handful of scholarly publications, publishing enabled by this kind of tool is plugging many academics into research and discourse as never before.

...

Open-access academic publishing has its limitations and drawbacks. It can be blocked by Internet filters. Its low cost makes the publication of inferior and unreliable journals much easier. And, in rendering scholarship freely available to anyone who can go online, it increases the risk that research in fields such as medicine will fall into the hands of people who might misuse it.

Because of their strong connection to local economies, regional IHEs are capable of providing licenses or seed funding and office space, with all parties aiming to contribute to the economic development of the state and region. Universities benefit from technology transfer and commercialization activities by attracting and retaining top academicians as well as gaining from license income.

Communities and states that provide the entrepreneurial infrastructure in which university technology transfer and commercialization can flourish benefit from the resulting start-ups and business expansions, including radically new technologies for growth sectors. Also, the possibilities for stimulating economic growth can potentially be even more far-reaching if universities form alliances.

The acting director of the National Institutes of Health begged university administrators on Wednesday to avoid even applying for stimulus money unless the universities planned to hire people almost immediately. . . . 'It would be the height of embarrassment,' the official, Dr. Raynard S. Kington, said, 'if we give these grants and find out that institutions are not spending them to hire people and make purchases and advance the science the way they're designed to do.' . . . Not a problem, the administrators said, in interviews. After working under flat federal research financing for years, scientists are ecstatic. 'This is a miracle, I think,' A. J. Stewart Smith, the dean for research at Princeton, said. 'It is redressing this terrible problem where the success rate for excellent proposals was very low.' . . . 'We're grateful for the money, but it's not such a large number that anybody's going to have to look very hard for good projects to fund,' said Leslie Tolbert, the vice president for research at the University of Arizona