A smaller amount of scientific research is funded by charitable foundations, especially in relation to developing cures for diseases such as cancer, malaria, and AIDS.
In the early Zhou dynasty (-c. 6th century to 221 BCE), government officials used their resources to fund schools of thought of which they were patron.
Furthermore, Tycho Brahe was given an estate (-c. 1576 – 1580) by his royal patron King Frederik II, which was used to build Uraniborg, an early research institute.
Membership was exclusive in terms of gender, race and class, but academies opened the world of research up beyond the traditional patronage system.
A system of patents was developed to allow inventors a period of time (often twenty years) to commercialize their inventions and recoup a profit, although in practice many found this difficult.
The Manhattan Project (1942 – 1946) had cost $27 billion and employed 130,000 people, many of them scientists charged with producing the first nuclear weapons.
It remained the case, however, that imitation by competitors - circumventing or simply flouting patents, especially those registered abroad - was often just as successful a strategy for companies focused on innovation in matters of organization and production technique, or even in marketing.
On geographic coverage, GERD takes into account performance within the territory of a country whereas GBARD also payments to the Rest of the world.
Higher education institutions are usually not completely publicly financed as they charge tuition fees and may receive funds from non-public sources.
Science policy can assist to avoid this as large shares of governmental R&D is spent on researchers and supporting staff personnel salaries.
This invention was largely driven by the German ordoliberal school as to eliminate state subsidies advocated by the French dirigiste.
[22] Threats to global public goods has refueled the debate on the role of governments beyond a mere market failure fixer, the so-called mission-driven policies.
[34] As of 2022, the European Commission also introduced a “Do No Significant Harm” principle to the Framework Program which aims to curb the environmental footprint of scientific projects.
The process of grant writing and grant proposing is a somewhat delicate process for both the grantor and the grantee: the grantors want to choose the research that best fits their scientific principles, and the individual grantees want to apply for research in which they have the best chances but also in which they can build a body of work towards future scientific endeavors.
[citation needed] As of 2009, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council in the United Kingdom devised an alternative method of fund-distribution: the sandpit.
In academic contexts, hard money may refer to funding received from a government or other entity at regular intervals, thus providing a steady inflow of financial resources to the beneficiary.
Since funds are disbursed regularly and continuously, the offices in charge of such projects are able to achieve their objectives more effectively than if they had been issued one-time grants.
[46] Philanthropists and foundations have been pouring millions of dollars into a wide variety of scientific investigations, including basic research discovery, disease cures, particle physics, astronomy, marine science, and the environment.
[47][48] Many large technology companies spend billions of dollars on research and development each year to gain an innovative advantage over their competitors, though only about 42% of this funding goes towards projects that are considered substantially new, or capable of yielding radical breakthroughs.
[49] New scientific start-up companies initially seek funding from crowd-funding organizations, venture capitalists, and angel investors, gathering preliminary results using rented facilities,[50] but aim to eventually become self-sufficient.
Results showed a statistically significant association between industry sponsorship and pro-industry conclusions and concluded that "Conflicts of interest arising from these ties can influence biomedical research in important ways".
In 2001 CROs came under criticism when the editors of 12 major scientific journals issued a joint editorial, published in each journal, on the control over clinical trials exerted by sponsors, particularly targeting the use of contracts which allow sponsors to review the studies prior to publication and withhold publication of any studies in which their product did poorly.
[58] The Cochrane Collaboration, a worldwide group that aims to provide compiled scientific evidence to aid well informed health care decisions, conducts systematic reviews of randomized controlled trials of health care interventions and tries to disseminate the results and conclusions derived from them.
"[61] In 2003 researchers looked at the association between authors' published positions on the safety and efficacy in assisting with weight loss of olestra, a fat substitute manufactured by the Procter & Gamble (P&G), and their financial relationships with the food and beverage industry.
Out of the scientists questioned, 15.5% admitted to altering design, methodology or results of their studies due to pressure of an external funding source.
However, the use of journal impact factor has generated a publish-or-perish culture and a theoretical model has been established whose simulations imply that peer review and over-competitive research funding foster mainstream opinion to monopoly.
[68][69] Novel measurement systems such as the Research Quality Plus has been put forward to better emphasize local knowledge and contextualization in the evaluation of excellence.
A recent study by Wayne Walsh found that “prestigious institutions had on average 65% higher grant application success rates and 50% larger award sizes, whereas less-prestigious institutions produced 65% more publications and had a 35% higher citation impact per dollar of funding.”[71][72] In endogenous growth theories R&D contributes to economic growth.
[79] As R&D is a long-term investments and so disruptions should be avoided Keynesian countercyclical reactions were advocated for in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, but this was difficult to achieve for some countries.
[82] The pandemic made health research and sectors with strategic value-chain dependencies the main target of science funding.