Researchers garner up to $110K a year from industry

Researchers at U.S. universities garner an average of a little more than $33,000 a year from the drug and device industry, with some earning up to $110,869, according to a new survey of 1,663 researchers. And those lucrative and very common ties are raising the importance of revealing the financial links that bind academic researchers to industry.

"Highly educated people may be more likely to feel they aren't susceptible to influence, but there's a huge literature to suggest it happens," says Eric Campbell, the author of the study. He adds that the academic researchers that share their data with industry are more likely to report positive outcomes.

Just over half of all academic researchers in the survey reported doing work for industry, and 41 percent said that the ties factored into their most important efforts. "There are some well-documented negative effects of industry funding, but a large portion of these people have reported they think it helped lead to important scientific discoveries," Campbell said. "Someone has to decide how to make those two things balance."

- read the story from Bloomberg

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