Nonprofit Research

Each year billions of foundation, government, and private charitable dollars are spent supporting research conducted by nonprofit organizations ^[1]. Journalists, educators, funders, academics, policy analysts, elected officials and nonprofit professionals rely on this research to effectively participate in public dialogue about issues of social concern.

Yet despite the extensive financial commitment to and widespread interest in research from the third sector, there has been no easy way for nonprofits to publish and disseminate their findings. This has been a real disservice to the foundations and organizations who fund the research, the nonprofits who produce it, and the people who rely on these findings to guide policy decisions, inform future research efforts, design advocate interventions and strategies, and educate about social issues.

There are several organizations that have been making efforts to address this gap in the sector's infrastructure. Among them are IssueLab, the Foundation Center, and PolicyArchive. Each of these services works to archive and disseminate nonprofit research but with a bit of a different focus. IssueLab accepts work from all nonprofit organizations, PolicyArchive accepts works on public policy research, and the Foundation Center's PubHub, an online catalog of links to reports, accepts foundation-funded research in collaboration with the IUPUI University Library's FOLIO archive. PubHub and PolicyArchive work closely with the IUPUI University Library's Philanthropy Archives. Each service also has a slightly different approach to questions of taxonomy and judging the quality of research. Each service, though, is built on an open-source platform, allows for data harvesting, and encourages the use of creative commons licensing. Each service also provides users with differing features such as eNewsletters, RSS feeds and custom services. Other services like the University of Wisconsin's Scout Report include links to nonprofit research, but do not aggregate those listings in one place.

The emergence of these services is a testament to larger shifts in the fields of online and academic publishing. These shifts include: efforts to catalog and disseminate work that has not historically made its way into academic journals, efforts to more quickly publish work that is time-sensitive, efforts to redefine "peer-review", and efforts to make work that has been produced for the public good more openly and easily accessible.

Additional Resources

• Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University
• Creative Commons
• IssueLab
• IUPUI University Library's Philanthropy Archives
• The Nonprofit Sector: A Research Handbook, Yale University Press
• Open Archives Initiative
• Open Educational Resources
• PolicyArchive
• PubHub

References

1. ^ 39th Battelle-R&D Magazine forecast.