Dive Brief:
- The University of Texas System has made its 15,000 faculty members more accessible with a searchable database called Influuent.
- Inside Higher Ed reports the database is expected to facilitate new partnerships and increase the portion of private sector contributions to the system’s research spending from its current place of about 21%.
- Influuent automatically cross-checks citation data weekly to keep faculty profiles up-to-date and provides a platform for outside entities to communicate with individual researchers or entire teams.
Dive Insight:
With shrinking investment in higher education in some states and stricter scrutiny over spending in many more, university systems are getting creative with their budgets. Faculty who balance teaching with research often do not have time to market their projects for partnerships. In Texas, the Influuent database will do much of the public relations work for them. Anyone interested in collaborating simply has to type search terms into the database and sift through the results for the best fit.
The Texas system isn't the first to respond to financial pressure with similar initiatives. Several campuses within the University of Michigan system joined together for corporate relations work in 2011 and Inside Higher Ed reports Texas administrators also consulted with their peers in North Carolina while developing Influuent.