Article of Interest from The Scholarly Kitchen

Guest Post — Funding Research Services: How Libraries are Exploring Cost Recovery Models

• By Hilary Craiglow, Cynthia Hudson Vitale, Tim McGeary
• Dec 8, 2025
• Time To Read: 7 mins

Excerpt:

 

Editor’s note: Today’s post is by Hilary Craiglow, Cynthia Hudson Vitale, and Tim McGeary. Hilary leads library consulting at Attain Partners, a higher education consulting firm. Cynthia is Associate Dean for Technology Strategy and Digital Services at Johns Hopkins University Libraries, where she leads strategic initiatives in support of research, teaching, and scholarly communication. Tim is the Associate University Librarian for Digital Strategies & Technology at the Duke University Libraries, where he leads in strategic visioning and implementation of digital initiatives and programs for libraries and their partnerships in technology and research, building internal and external collaborations to create sustainable solutions for scholars and researchers. 

"Academic and research libraries have long been a cornerstone of the scholarly enterprise, providing the information resources, books, journals, collections, and expertise that make research possible. Over time, the roles of research libraries have expanded and now encompass modern, mission-critical services such as research data management, curation, and sharing; systematic reviews; digital transformation initiatives; impact assessment; and an ever-growing range of functional and discipline-specific supports that connect directly to every stage of the research process.

These activities are now fundamental to how scholarship is created, published, and shared. Unlike the broad-based resources libraries provide to all users, regardless of discipline, project, or financial situation, this research support work is inherently more specialized and project-specific. Much of it happens within individual labs or through grant-funded initiatives, which means it requires deep expertise, significant staff time, and customized workflows tailored to each research team’s methodologies, timelines, and deliverables.

This project-specific nature of research support also intersects with how university research is funded. Research across a university exists along a broad spectrum of funding sources. Some research is supported by departmental or centralized institutional funds that are broadly available to the academic community. In contrast, other research relies on extramural grants, external funding from agencies, foundations, or other sponsors, which include specific compliance requirements, budget requirements, deliverables, and accountability tied to the projects or researchers."

 

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