The University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) is a public research university in Chicago, Illinois. Total student enrollment at UIC as of fall 2022 was 33,747, with 21,807 undergraduates, 7,798 graduate students, and 4,142 professional students. The student-to-faculty ratio is 19:1, 81% of full-time undergraduates receive financial assistance, and one third of undergraduates are first-generation college students. UIC is a federally-designated minority-serving institution.
Institutional Alignment
UIC has a specific goal to “advance UIC’s commitment to the city of Chicago.” The UIC chancellor has been focused on community engagement as a key priority for the past six years. Similarly, individual colleges have specific social impact missions through the training of local teachers and health care providers. By contrast, due to the lack of unified promotion or valuation, open science at UIC is seen at the level of individual researchers or research teams as opposed to a particular focus of a department, college, or the university as a whole.
National Institutes of Health (NIH) Data Sharing and the Local Chicago Community
All research institutions that receive NIH funding have been gearing up to meet the new NIH requirements for data management and sharing, as its new policy went into effect in January 2023. The UIC Library, which has been working with the campus to meet the obligations of the new grant requirements, is also planning to address community engagement with the data managed and shared by the institution.
As a prominent health science campus, UIC’s health grants typically engage the community. UIC is often asked for its majority-Latino hospital records for research, for example, and the university and the library are committed to return value to the community. Many students engage in capstone research projects that involve going into the community, for example for survey research.
UIC has developed neighborhood centers as part of its Advancing Racial Equity initiative. Former UIC Chancellor Michael Amiridis formed the neighborhood centers “during the social unrest in 2020 to address the institutional and structural racism that impacts the campus and its neighboring communities,” and the university continues these commitments. The UIC Library is a partner in the centers—providing IT equipment, access to information, and referrals and leading the development of ethical frameworks for data storage and sharing as the library fields more and more questions on these issues.
For additional information about Accelerating Social Impact Research: Libraries at the Intersection of Openness and Community-Engaged Scholarship, please read the ARL report or view additional institutional profiles.
