Committee on Institutional Cooperation

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The Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), also known as the "Academic Big Ten", was established in 1958 and is a consortium of one Northeastern and eleven primarily Midwestern universities (the eleven members of the Big Ten Conference and former Big Ten member University of Chicago) committed to advancing academic excellence by promoting and coordinating collaborative activities and sharing resources. Its programs and activities extend to all aspects of university activity except intercollegiate athletics. These endeavors are organized to augment and complement institutional programs without supplanting them or reducing their individual importance. This results in serious limits to the Committee's influence.

The CIC is governed by the thirteen Chief Academic Officers of the member universities (with a provost from both Illinois Chicago and Illinois Urbana Champaign) who are known as the CIC "Members." A headquarters staff of 16, located in Champaign, Illinois, administers the CIC programs.

CIC universities confer, on average, 15% of all Ph.D. degrees awarded annually in the United States. Collectively, the CIC member universities engage in $5.6 billion in externally funded research annually, employ more than 33,000 full-time faculty members, and enroll nearly one-half million undergraduate, graduate, and professional students.

On June 6 2007, the CIC announced a new partnership with Google. An explicit goal of the project is that of offering a public, shared digital repository of all the open access content. The University of Michigan, which has developed its MBooks platform for its own digitized books, will serve as the central repository for the CIC project.

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