A team of University of Michigan professors have created a new model for funding academic research [1] that potentially eliminates months of delay from when an idea is born till the money arrives to put it in play, the Washington Post reports. They hope the rapid-funding approach will help their peers at Michigan [2] compete in an increasingly fast-paced research community. (U-Mich, with $1.24 billion in annual research funding, is the second-most-productive [3] research university in the nation, behind Johns Hopkins.) Ideas that used to languish for months or years in poorly circulated academic journals now see instantaneous release online and can be shared by all. Michigan administrators believe the concept, an apparent first among the nation’s research universities, represents the future of scholarship on university campuses.