Public research is carried out by research universities and public research institutions (PRIs) which are publicly owned, publicly operated or primarily funded with public money (IPP, 2014). PRIs are very diverse: their missions, activities, governance and performance vary widely across countries. Although some PRIs may offer education and training services, they usually only provide R&D support to business firms and public authorities; they may also act as intermediaries between firms and universities by interpreting the technical needs of the market (OECD, 2011). For universities teaching is an essential function, along with research.

Public research plays a key role in innovation systems. It is the source of new knowledge, especially in areas of public interest, such as basic science or fields related to social and environmental challenges, which businesses are not always well equipped or motivated to invest in.

Information and communication technologies (ICTs), new data storage infrastructure and large-scale computing are modifying the way science is conducted and the way the results of research are disseminated. They offer new opportunities to organise and publish the inputs and outputs of research, whether scientific publications or large datasets, to make it available for free, or at extremely low marginal cost, to other scientists and researchers and potential users in the business community and society. Furthermore, even though fields such as physics and medicine have long been data-intensive, ICTs make it possible to collect large amounts of data that can be the basis of scientific experiments and research and help make science more data-driven. This transformation of science into a more open and data-driven enterprise is often known as open science.It is enabled by public policies that encourage greater access to the results of publicly funded research, including publications and data.

The commercialisation of public research is a major goal of national S&T policies and a key function of universities and PRIs, alongside teaching, education and the dissemination of knowledge. Public research has been the source of many of today’s innovations, sometimes as a by-product of basic research and sometimes without any prospect of a direct business application. Well-known examples are the techniques of recombinant DNA, the global positioning system (GPS), MP3 technology and Siri, Apple’s voice recognition technology. Data on scientific sources of many of today’s nanotechnology, ICT and biotechnology patents provide additional evidence of the linkages between technological innovations and public research (OECD, 2013a).