Thirty-three university-based educational research centers have formed a new network, the Education Policy Alliance, to try to make their findings more accessible to lawmakers, educators, journalists, and the public.

The alliance, announced today, has established a free Internet search engine tapping into all 33 centers’ Web sites and publications, offering instant access to the work of hundreds of experts in the field. In addition to allowing national searches, the search engine is being refined to allow queries that are specific to each of the 23 states where the centers are located.

The alliance was pulled together over the past year by Kevin G. Welner, director of the Education in the Public Interest Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Alex Molnar, director of the Education Policy Research Unit at Arizona State University at Tempe. Research centers with a wide variety of missions and political orientations were invited to join the alliance, with the only requirements being that they deal with education and be university-based, Mr. Welner said in an interview.

“Oftentimes, professors labor in relative obscurity, producing, usually, pretty good research that very few people have access to or know about,” Mr. Welner said. “This is a way to increase the visibility of, and access to, that research.”

Among the centers that have joined the alliance is Policy Analysis for California Education, or PACE, based at Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley. In a news release issued today, David N. Plank, PACE’s executive director, said centers like his joined the alliance “because we are committed to making scholarly research accessible to a broader policy audience and increasing its impact on educational policy debates.” —Peter Schmidt