Talk:List of federally funded research and development centers

This should start with a neutral description, not criticism. Also, there should not be so many sentences starting with "critics say". These statements should either be sourced or deleted. 24.205.85.14 19:18, 6 August 2007 (UTC)


 * Update: the entire introduction is actually a copy-paste from the CRS report listed in the 'external links' section. 24.205.85.14 20:10, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

Important to make the distinction between 'not-for-profit' and 'non-profit' institutions. For example, MITRE is a 'not-for-profit', meaning it makes a fee but this fee is used to finance R&D efforts, the products of which are then given to the US DoD for their use.

Nevertheless, having just checked the NSF page that this page clearly uses as its reference, NSF considers MITRE to be non-profit. Very odd.

I agree with the first comment. Criticism is fine, but the article should not start with a note on criticism. I cannot think of any precedent (including other Wikipedia articles) for this. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 171.64.165.83 (talk) 16:38, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

I suggest that the FFRDC is categorized into nonprofit, corporate and university administrators. Something like this: FFRDC by Admin on Google Docs. If someone else wants to update the article with these categories, please do so. My wiki-fu is weak :)

Playeren (talk) 11:21, 29 November 2011 (UTC)

Article Title Must Be Changed
The article should be titled: 'List of federally funded research and development centers in USA' or the like, as it is only about that country's federal funding. Otherwise words should be capitalised so it specifically means FFRDC (as a US terminology). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.78.56.197 (talk) 06:34, 14 April 2014 (UTC)
 * There are a few problems with that approach:
 * You'd expect other countries to use names different than "federally funded research and development centers" (e.g., Cooperative Research Centre in Australia), so there really is no need for disambiguation. (Why would an Australian look up "federally funded research and development centers" when the thing he or she is looking for is called "cooperative research centers" in his own country?)
 * Based on a brief web search, it looks to me like the wholesale outsourcing of research facilities is primarily a US (and to a lesser extent Australian) phenomenon. Research centers in Canada, Germany, India, and the United Kingdom look like they're either government agency run or are embedded in universities.  So again, it's hard to see where any confusion would arise.
 * As for the capitalization argument, the original US regulation capitalizes the name, so I guess there's something to be said there, but a web search shows that most non-US government usage is lowercase.
 * -- DanielPenfield (talk) 09:05, 14 April 2014 (UTC)


 * I think I'd vote in favor of (i) title capitalization, (ii) removing the words 'List of' from the title, and (iii) adding some more useful descriptive text to the lede paragraph. The article doesn't describe the concept of an FFRDC, which might be more likely to justify the lower case usage. If it stays just as a list, then capitalizing is appropriate, since it presents a set of specific entities. Seems like we should aim to be a bit more like UARC, for example, which both describes and lists the orgs - and is capitalized as well!  jxm (talk) 19:17, 14 April 2014 (UTC)