The academic Center of Excellence (COE) will promote advanced research and development, professional training and education of open source-related issues within the U.S. government and public sector entities. The COE will establish collaborative relationships with other Institutes of Higher Learning in order to share and promote the development of R&D activities and recruit the best and most diverse field of researchers and students.

There are many areas of R&D and business case and technical analysis that have been identified as priority for NCOSPR. Most of these areas of research and program analysis evolve from existing development and/or implementation programs and/or challenges. Some of the key areas of priority interest include:

  - OpenGIS/Remove Sensing/Geospatial Database Conflation
  - High Performance Computing/Clustering/Shared Resource/GRID Computing
  - Multi-Layered Security (MLS) Operating System
  - DoD Web Services
  - Civilian Government Web Services

In addition to those areas, the NCOSPR will also be involved in the development of training materials as well as courseware and curriculum for technical and academic open source training and educational programs.