[3] The role for funding of academic research from industrial sources has received much attention both in a historical and contemporary perspective.
[10] While many such partnerships exist, due to their informal nature and resulting lack of record, it is difficult to track how extensive and impactful such relationships are, with most relying on surveys and other self-reporting measures.
[11] Far more extensively, in many fields and countries, a narrow majority of academic scientists report having some soft industry relationships, primarily through consulting.
[12][13] Such informal industry academic relationships have a long-standing tradition as they served as a major source of funding for individual labs prior to WW2.
[12] On a larger scale, there have been numerous attempts to create collaborative University-Industry Research Centers (UIRCs) to jointly host academic and industry researchers to address industry problems with direct, large scale collaborative centers.
[14] These centers were generally regarded as highly successful and made expansion of governmental support for joint industry and academic ventures more favorable.
In the early 1980s, states began contributing funding to UIRCs and other industry-academic partnerships to encourage local economic growth from innovation.
[14] UIRCs, coupled to early seeding from both state and federal government, continued to greatly expand during the 1980s and early 1990s, eventually receiving nearly 70% of industry funding of academic research and incentivizing a tripling of industry funding of academic research during the 1980s.
CROs, which are specifically designed for this function have drawn substantial industry clinical research funding away from academia and are growing rapidly.
[20] This could, in part, be due to the fact that usually when an academic accepts industry funding, particularly when working on an existing product, researchers have to sign non-disclosure agreements which often prevent the publication of negative results and inhibit the openness of science.
[citation needed] There are additionally many scholars who have considered advantages of industrially funded academic research.
Supporting this, academic science funded by industry sources does result in more patents per dollar, increased licensing of these patents, and even more citations per published paper than research supported by other sources, including federal at the University of California Berkeley.