supercomputer is £8.4 million, with the balance being provided by the N8 universities. NICE will be a tier-2 supercomputer built on 32 IBM Power 9 dual-CPU nodes, each having 4 NVIDIA V100 GPUs. In 2015, multimillion-pound funding was awarded to N8 Research Partnership, to advance AgriFood Resilience, and Policing, research areas across N8 institutions and with partners. In 2023, the N8 became the first coalition of British universities to coordinate policies on open access, issuing a statement calling for academics to retain rights to their work under a CC BY licence, which some publishers reject. Publishing under this licence would allow work to be placed immediately in an institutional repository, rather than the intellectual property being transferred to the publishers. Research the N8 Research Partnership's main research themes are: Net Zero North, Child of the North, Computationally Intensive Research, Policing Research Partnership and AgriFood. Universities The eight universities in the N8 Research Partnership are all located in Northern England. Five of the members are civic universities founded as university colleges in the second half of the nineteenth century, two are collegiate campus plate glass universities founded in the 1960s, and one is a pre-Victorian collegiate university founded in the first half of the nineteenth century. They range in size from around 13,000 students to just under 40,000, and in annual income from a few hundred million pounds to over a billion. Seven of the N8 universities (all except Lancaster University) are members of the Russell Group, and all were in the top 25 of Research Fortnight's research power table based on the results of the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (where Lancaster was the highest ranked non-Russell Group institution). The three N8 institutions in Yorkshire (Leeds, Sheffield and York) also collaborate in the White Rose University Consortium. Between them, the N8 universities educate over 190,000 students, including 17,000 studying for a research degree, and have a combined research income of over £1.2 billion. A report in 2016, commissioned by the group, demonstrated that they bring in £12.2 billion to the regional economy each year and generate 119,000 jobs across the North of England. References External links N8 website Leeds press release on the N8 Group N8 High Performance Computing capability regeNer8 – the N8 Centre for Translational Regenerative Medicine Policing Research website N8 AgriFood College and university associations and consortia in the United Kingdom Durham University Innovation in the United Kingdom