Tony Zanders

Research support has become extraordinarily sophisticated at the beginning of the lifecycle. The same cannot always be said about the other end.

One of the privileges of spending nearly twenty years around research libraries is seeing how much expertise sits behind a seemingly simple request. A researcher asks for help finding information. What follows may involve database selection, search strategy, subject expertise, controlled vocabularies, citation tracing, licensing restrictions, data management, copyright, research methods, publishing strategy, and an understanding of how knowledge is organized within a discipline.

Former employers of mine like ProQuest and EBSCO built the technical infrastructure that make this work possible. Research libraries built the human infrastructure around it. Together, they helped make an extraordinary amount of scholarship discoverable.

The research consultation became one of the clearest expressions of the library’s value. A good librarian could help a researcher move from a broad question to a more precise understanding of what had already been studied, where the evidence was strong, where it was weak, and where a new contribution might be made. But I cannot remember many research consultations beginning with another kind of discovery question: Who needs the answer?

Not who will cite it, which journal will publish it, or which scholars are working on the same topic. But who is experiencing the problem today, or who could act on the findings. Or better yet has data, lived experience, capital, distribution, regulatory authority, manufacturing capacity, or operational responsibility related to the question? Who would recognize the value of the research if it were translated into terms they could use?

This is not a criticism of librarians. Libraries were not organized or funded to perform every function in the research enterprise. It is a question about where we decided research support should end.

The conventional research lifecycle begins with a question, moves through literature discovery and data collection, and culminates in publication. After publication, the library may preserve the work in an institutional repository, track citations, support open access, or help the researcher describe the work’s scholarly influence. And while those are meaningful services, publication is not the same as use.

A research finding does not automatically reach an entrepreneur because it has been placed in a repository. A community does not automatically benefit just because an article is open access. A public agency does not automatically change policy because the evidence exists. A company does not automatically recognize that a laboratory discovery could become a product.

Availability is a necessary condition for impact, but it should not be confused with a distribution strategy.

Skilltype emerged from a similar realization about organizational talent. Libraries had job descriptions, training budgets, strategic plans, and performance reviews, but those pieces did not automatically produce the expertise required to execute institutional priorities. Someone had to connect the organization’s goals, the capabilities of its people, and the resources available to help them grow.

Research impact may have a comparable coordination problem.

Universities have researchers, libraries, technology-transfer offices, entrepreneurship centers, corporate-relations teams, community-engagement offices, advancement teams, incubators, research parks, and even economic-development partnerships. What they often do not have is a shared mechanism for helping those parts discover one another around a specific piece of research. We have invested heavily in helping researchers discover knowledge. We have invested less consistently in helping knowledge discover its users. And that distinction feels increasingly important.

I don’t believe that researchers should not be required to commercialize everything they study. Agreeing with a recent post from William Garity at UC Davis, basic research must be protected from the pressure to produce an immediate product or financial return. Scholarship in the humanities and social sciences should not have to imitate biotechnology to prove its worth. But every researcher could benefit from understanding the landscape surrounding the problem.

Who cares about it? Who has already tried to solve it? Who might contest the framing? Who could contribute evidence? Who might implement the findings? Or more importantly, who could fund the next stage? These questions do not compromise academic inquiry. They can make it more informed.

Research libraries already employ people who are exceptionally good at uncovering relationships between questions, evidence, people, and sources. The profession has spent decades developing expertise in discovery. Perhaps the next frontier is not another discovery layer for articles, but a discovery layer for relevance.

What would change if every major research project had access to someone responsible for identifying not only the scholarly literature, but the external landscape of potential users, affected communities, implementation partners, and real-world applications?

That person could sit in the library. They may sit in technology transfer. They may sit in a new unit that does not yet exist. But the question will remain: After we help researchers find everything they need, who helps them find everyone who may need what they discover?

I have spent almost twenty years working with universities, research libraries, scholarly information, and the people responsible for connecting researchers with knowledge.

I did not plan my career that way.

My path moved through ProQuest and EBSCO, two companies that helped universities organize and deliver access to enormous bodies of scholarship. I spent years listening to library leaders explain how research was changing, how technology was changing, and how the role of the library had to change with both, concluding with time as an entrepreneur in residence at the Boston University Libraries.

Later, I founded Skilltype because I became convinced that libraries could not navigate their future without a more intentional way to understand and develop the expertise of their people.

That conviction eventually led me beyond libraries. Annual Reviews has also influenced this reflection. The nonprofit scholarly publisher became an investor in Skilltype in 2023. Its mission is built around synthesizing the state of knowledge so researchers can understand what is already known and where the unanswered questions remain.

Today, my work at Nexus Louisiana places me much closer to entrepreneurs, investors, universities, economic development leaders, and the difficult process of turning an idea into something people can use. I now spend more time thinking about companies, capital, intellectual property, product development, and the conditions required for innovation to survive outside the institution where it began.

Taken together, these experiences have exposed me to different points along the same continuum.

ProQuest and EBSCO helped researchers reach knowledge. Research libraries helped researchers navigate it. Annual Reviews helps researchers make sense of it. Skilltype helps the organizations supporting researchers develop the talent required to do that work. Nexus Louisiana helps entrepreneurs turn knowledge and ideas into companies.

For most of my career, I treated these as adjacent industries. But I’m beginning to see them as parts of one unfinished system. The university is exceptionally good at producing research. It has developed sophisticated infrastructure to fund it, conduct it, review it, publish it, organize it, preserve it, and measure how other scholars engage with it.

But what happens next?

• Who helps determine whether a discovery matters to anyone outside the researcher’s discipline?
• Who identifies the entrepreneur who might see a product inside an invention disclosure?
• Who finds the community whose lived experience could change the research question before the study begins?
• Who translates a technical finding for a policymaker, clinician, manufacturer, school system, small business, or investor?
• Who notices that a patent sitting in one part of the university could solve a problem being experienced somewhere else?

These are increasingly the questions I find myself thinking about.

After spending nearly twenty years helping knowledge move through universities, I am beginning to wonder whether the next twenty should be spent helping it move beyond them. This is not some announcement that I’ve decided what the next chapter will be. But I am trying to follow the questions my work keeps putting in front of me.

The more time I spend around research libraries, scholarly publishers, entrepreneurs, and economic development, the harder it is to ignore the space between them. There is a gap between what universities know and what communities, companies, and institutions can actually use. That gap is not caused by a lack of intelligence, or a lack of research, or a lack of capital. Most times it’s caused by a lack of translation, matchmaking, relationships, incentives, and people who understand enough of several worlds to help them work together. And perhaps that is the work. Perhaps the next twenty years are not about leaving the world I have worked in. Perhaps they are about connecting its pieces.

This year, I want to explore that possibility publicly.

I want to think about how research libraries define impact, how universities move intellectual property, how communities shape research, how entrepreneurs discover academic inventions, and what new kinds of roles may be required. Most of all, I want to ask a personal question honestly: What have the first twenty years of my career prepared me to do with the next twenty?