Today, November 12, 2014, ARL—along with more than 130 other higher education, scientific, and business organizations in the US—sent a letter to Congress (PDF), urging lawmakers to close the nation’s innovation deficit. The innovation deficit is the widening gap between actual and needed federal investments in research at a time when other nations such as China and India are dramatically boosting research funding to develop the next great technological and medical breakthroughs to power their economies forward. The coalition is calling for the enactment of an omnibus FY 2015 appropriations bill that provides strong funding for research and higher education.
The campaign to close the innovation deficit began in July 2013 with an open letter to the President and Congress, signed by more than 200 university presidents and chancellors. That letter described the innovation deficit and called on leaders to close it with investments in research and higher education.
Support the campaign by tweeting about it with the hashtag #InnovationDeficit. Visit www.innovationdeficit.org for videos, an infographic, charts, graphs, and other materials explaining the innovation deficit and the threat it poses to the nation’s economic future.
The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is a nonprofit organization of 125 research libraries in the US and Canada. ARL’s mission is to influence the changing environment of scholarly communication and the public policies that affect research libraries and the diverse communities they serve. ARL pursues this mission by advancing the goals of its member research libraries, providing leadership in public and information policy to the scholarly and higher education communities, fostering the exchange of ideas and expertise, facilitating the emergence of new roles for research libraries, and shaping a future environment that leverages its interests with those of allied organizations. ARL is on the web at https://www.arl.org/.
