
Ask HN: Anyone have experience partnering with/selling data to academia? - maest
I am familiar with the process of selling data to &quot;regular&quot; businesses, but academia is uncharted territory.<p>What are the things to keep in mind when either selling research data to universities or parntering up with universities to have them produce research based on your data?
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tastroder
Most of academia is funding driven, rarely budgeting for acquisition of
proprietary data sources imho (outside of really specific proposals that
require it). Proprietary datasets are highly unattractive in the first place,
at least in my discipline. The closed nature makes it hard to produce
publications based on the dataset and effectively leads to researchers doing
twice the work for no added benefit to themselves or their group in most
cases.

If you can ignore the selling angle and go into the "partnering" area, I'd
suggest looking at:

\- established partnership programs (either area-local or industry specific),
many institutes participate in those and might give you good local connections
for the appropriate contacts

\- approaching principal researchers in appropriate settings (e.g.
conferences)

\- Specific program partnerships, e.g. funding a research positions / take on
Bachelor/Master thesis as an external advisor / or even offer student projects
in cooperation with an appropriate course (at least here in Europe those are
part of many programs and people actively look for industry cooperation
sometimes).

\- If you already have academia ties you could co-organize / sponsor a shared
task in your domain, essentially giving out your data, providing a competition
for a few challenging research questions. This would likely require
partnership with a researcher that has done this before in order to be
recognized by academia, otherwise it's just like any other Kaggle competition.

Disclaimer: Completely European perspective, all of those require investment
from you instead of the other way around. I'm sure it works somewhat
differently with for-profit universities over the pond.

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maest
Your view on the limited budgets and dislike for propriatary data fit with my
priors, especiually in Europe.

What I was surprised about is that some large universities (in the States, at
least) have dedicated data acquisition departments, which suggests they
acquire data often enough to need a department for it.

Thanks for the rest of the advice.

