Back page gossip from the 18 July issue of Research Europe

Ten years ago, the EU was waiting to see which portfolios would be handed to the new crop of European Commission political leaders due to take office in November, much as the bloc is today following the European Parliament election that took place in June.

Back in July 2014, research and innovation sector representatives were concerned that responsibility for R&I could be placed in separate commissioner portfolios.

“The separation between innovation and research would be bad news, because having them together has forced people to put themselves in a different state of mind,” Jean-Pierre Bourguignon, at the time president of the European Research Council, told Research Europe.

Peter Tindemans, then secretary-general of the researcher association EuroScience, said: “It’s a real threat, because it seems to be being seriously considered, and if it happens it will really backtrack on positive developments.”

The move was thought to be under consideration due to the need to find enough portfolios for what was at that time a recently expanded crew of 28 commissioners.

Today, of course, there are only 27 commissioners as a result of Brexit. But in the previous political cycle, R&I were combined, with responsibility not only for education but also for culture, youth and sport in the portfolios of first Mariya Gabriel and then Iliana Ivanova.

Now the fear among sector leaders is that R&I and education might be separated. Were culture, youth and sport to be carved off, the sector would probably not protest very heavily.

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Gains in collaboration come with warnings for the future

Science ministers from the G7 group of the world’s richest democracies shared warm words in Italy this month, reaffirming, as EU research and innovation commissioner Iliana Ivanova put it afterwards, a “shared commitment to promote progress in R&I, aligned with the principles of openness, security, freedom and integrity”. With Ivanova—who also attended the event—stressing the need to “foster stronger collaboration among like-minded countries”, it has been encouraging to see two positive moves on this in relation to the EU’s R&I framework programme.

The first, the Commission asking EU governments to allow the start of formal talks on Singapore joining the current programme, Horizon Europe, marks the latest step towards the programme’s greater internationalisation. Singapore, like recent recruits Canada and New Zealand, and almost-there South Korea, is eyeing the programme’s second pillar, focused on societal challenges and industrial competitiveness. The move is even more welcome after the news that talks with Australia have—for now at least—ended without association.

Swiss movement

Closer to home, the European Commission has decided to allow Switzerland-based researchers to apply for more of the European Research Council’s major grant types for 2025, with calls opening this month. This offers a hopeful sign that the country is nearing a return to the R&I programme, of which the ERC is part, after wider disagreement between the Swiss government and the EU led the country to be frozen out of Horizon Europe.

While Switzerland-based researchers will not be able to claim any grants won until association to Horizon Europe has been agreed, allowing them to apply in anticipation suggests there is growing political confidence in a resolution. This is particularly the case since all involved will be mindful of the debacle surrounding the UK’s re-association, when researchers who applied in the hope of a swift deal were forced into relocating or giving up their grants when the anticipated agreement took much longer than expected.

But as the Framework Programme’s significance grows, as a means of achieving the kind of cooperation being espoused at the G7 meeting in Italy, so too is the need growing to address fundamental questions over its scale and role. 

This month has seen yet more calls for a “significant increase” to the budget of Horizon Europe’s successor, FP10, with more than 100 European associations representing organisations that carry out R&I signing a joint statement calling on the EU to act. 

But it’s striking that after months of such pressure, including numerous influential groups calling for a doubling of the programme’s budget from €93.5 billion to around €200bn, national representatives—in the guise of the European Research and Innovation Area Committee—held back from recommending any figure in a formal opinion on FP10 set out in June. The European University Association has been quick to signal that this “does not bode well”.

Wasted potential

Frustratingly, this week has also seen member state governments pitch a €400 million cut to the Commission’s proposed 2025 budget for Horizon Europe. The €12.7bn suggested by the Commission would already be down from around €12.9bn in 2024 after a redirection of priorities, including support for Ukraine. While the European Parliament, as is tradition, will likely ask for an increase on the Commission’s proposal, with the result ending up somewhere in the middle, the proposed chipping away at the current programme’s budget will not instil confidence in those hoping for a significant boost to the next.

The wasted potential resulting from Horizon Europe’s underfunding continues to be painfully visible in the low success rates of flagship schemes such as the ERC grants and the European Innovation Council, which has revealed a 7 per cent success rate for its latest round of Accelerator grants for technology-based startup companies. Speaking to Research Europe, the EU’s top R&I official, Marc Lemaître, acknowledged that the EIC’s inability to invest in more projects and companies was “a sad situation of untapped innovation potential”.

FP10 discussions

Meanwhile, beyond the numbers, debate is heating up over what the next R&I programme should and should not do: the Young European Research Universities Network has proposed taking the ambitious ‘missions’ on grand challenges, including cancer and climate change, outside of the scheme due to their reliance on other funding sources.

At a time when the EU and its members are stressing the value of scientific cooperation as a counterweight to wider political instability, the opportunity for the R&I programme’s development is huge. But as our comment editor John Whitfield warns this week, there is also a risk that FP10 ends up “half-baked, underfunded and misaligned, disappointing policymakers and researchers equally”.

That would be the biggest wasted opportunity of them all.

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Study of Norwegian funder shows screening two-page proposals benefits both applicants and reviewers, says Marco Seeber

Writing and evaluating research proposals is very time-consuming and can generate considerable costs, both direct and indirect.

For example, a 2021 study estimated that putting together a proposal for the European Research Council takes between three and six months of one person’s effort. Factoring in a 10 per cent success rate, this means that each funded proposal amounts to between 2.5 and five years of work—roughly the length of a postdoc contract. And this leaves out proposals that aren’t submitted, as well as institutional and national investments to promote and support applications.

Some scientists have estimated that searching for funding takes up to 60 per cent of their time. For funders, the costs of evaluating proposals—administration and evaluation managers, reviewers and editors—have been estimated at around 20-35 per cent of the allocated budget.

Wasted time

Not surprisingly, funding agencies are experimenting with ways to reduce this effort. One solution adopted by some agencies worldwide is to replace the traditional, single-stage evaluation of a full proposal with a two-stage process, in which applicants would submit a short proposal for initial review, with a full application required only if this first stage is passed.

In many, perhaps most, research calls, distinguishing between bad and good proposals is relatively simple, while separating good from excellent ones is much more challenging. By speeding up the process of sorting proposals that are ‘possibly’ from those that are ‘definitely not’, two-stage evaluation allows effort to be focused on separating the ‘good’ from the ‘excellent’.

Introducing stage two

Norway’s largest funder of health research, the Dam Foundation, introduced two-stage evaluation in 2020. Prior to this, all its calls required a single 10-page proposal. This was replaced with an initial two-page proposal, with a 10-page follow-up from applicants that passed this stage.

To gauge the effect of the change, my colleagues and I compared the evaluations of 593 long proposals in the one-stage process with 668 short and 184 long proposals in the two-stage process. We also used results from a survey of applicants and reviewers on the amount of effort they put into each.

Applicants in the one-stage process estimated that writing a long proposal took an average of 37 person-days. In the two-stage process, writing short proposals consumed an average of 16.75 person-days and 36 person-days for long proposals. Since nearly three-quarters of proposals were rejected in the first stage, the two-stage process saved on average 38 per cent of applicants’ time.

These are huge savings. To put them into perspective: a decade ago, a study of the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council estimated that researchers spent 550 working years in preparing 3,727 proposals—equivalent to AU$66 million (£35m) in salary costs. In a similar setting, a two-stage process would save roughly 209 working years and AU$25 million.

According to the reviewers’ estimates, the two-stage procedure also reduced the time they spent evaluating proposals by an average of 28 per cent. A study of a switch to two-stage evaluation at the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Research found a very similar result.

Applicants welcomed the new procedure, with only 2 to 4 per cent of those surveyed reporting dissatisfaction. The number of applications did not change.

Two-stage evaluation was also more consistent: on average, reviewers disagreed less in their assessments of short proposals than of long proposals. This might be because evaluators assessing short proposals avoid extreme scores, or that reviewing long proposals leads to cognitive fatigue and more erratic judgment.

Recognising trade-offs

The greater reliability may also be a result of cutting the number of evaluation criteria from nine to four: it’s been suggested that having many evaluation criteria also reduces accuracy. Funders need to understand these trade-offs between detail, effort and accuracy in peer review.

Two-stage evaluation might bring other changes that are harder to detect. For example, some types of proposal and applicant may be comparatively better off in a short rather than in a long version, or vice versa. Our analysis provided some hints in this regard: we found that the scores of short proposals that passed the first stage remained high, but also that their rank changed.

Our findings add to evidence that a two-stage process can make evaluation of research proposals more efficient and ease the burden on the research community. Experiences like that of the Dam Foundation provide a template of how it can be implemented.

Marco Seeber is a professor in the Department of Political Science and Management at the University of Agder, Norway

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Ambition to inject R&I into every decision is noble but fraught, says John Whitfield

Whatever else might be in short supply in EU research and innovation policy, it’s not ambition.

In April, a report from former Italian prime minister Enrico Letta called for research, innovation and education to become the EU’s “fifth freedom”, alongside the free movement of people, goods, services and capital.  

In June, the European Research Area and Innovation Committee argued that “R&I should play a greater role in EU strategic priorities”. Meanwhile, the Expert Group on the Economic and Societal Impact of Research and Innovation, an independent body advising the Commission, called for a “systemic R&I policy”, with the approach to issues such as climate change interweaving science and technology with considerations of economic competitiveness, social justice and environmental sustainability.

Also in June, another former Italian prime minister, Mario Draghi, whose report on boosting the EU’s competitiveness is expected any day, called for Europe to make R&I a “collective priority”, with an emphasis on support for academic excellence, disruptive innovation and startups.

Along with efforts to better link the work of the Commission’s directorate general for R&D with other areas of its policymaking, it’s possible to see this as a process by which research and innovation policy becomes just policy. The aim is to make sure that science and technology is factored into every discussion and decision in the way that economics already is.

Such ideas are not confined to Brussels. An OECD report published in April argued that the world’s multiple interconnecting crises require “transformative” R&I policies that go “beyond their traditional main focus on national competitiveness and economic growth”.

It’s not hard to spot obstacles to this approach. On the demand side, member states—particularly those with right-wing populist governments—seem unlikely to have much enthusiasm for a more science-based approach to policymaking. Leading on green hydrogen is probably not what Hungary’s government had in mind when it chose Make Europe Great Again as the slogan for its presidency.

Given everything else on Europe’s plate, even nations sympathetic to such a change will not have much spare capacity to drive it forward. EU-wide R&D spending as a percentage of GDP fell between 2021 and 2022.

On the supply side, it’s too often overlooked that issues such as commercialising research and driving the green transition are as much questions of social science as they are of technological progress. The ideas Europe needs are as likely to come out of business schools as they are from semiconductor research labs, but these disciplines still struggle for attention in EU research funding.

That’s not a reason to give up: this is difficult and, arguably, no government worldwide has achieved such a shift. It is also why it’s vital to draw a line, albeit a dotted one, between the debate over transformational change and the one currently happening around the shape of the next Framework Programme, FP10.

EU R&D programmes have already proved both easy to load with new jobs and expectations and easy to cut when money gets tight or new priorities appear. If anything, the message coming from bodies representing university research is that FP10 should do less, but better.

The League of European Research Universities has called for a cull of underperforming elements of the programme. The Young European Research Universities Network has called for the five R&D missions introduced in Horizon Europe to be kept but moved out of FP10.

Partly, this is lobby groups calling for more of what they like and less of what they don’t. Others have their own priorities: earlier this month, 110 bodies representing industry and industrial R&D called for FP10 to focus on industry participation.

But it also reflects the Framework Programme’s past performance. The Commission’s latest evaluation of FP8, better known as Horizon 2020, declared that its funding programmes for excellent research were “very satisfactory”, but that support for work on societal challenges had made only “moderate progress”, falling far short of targets for publications and patenting.  

The Commission blamed this shortfall partly on having chosen the wrong targets. Maybe, but it also contains information—including a reminder that the gap between means and ends is much narrower for basic research than for addressing societal challenges. Getting a paper in a high-impact journal isn’t easy, but it’s easier than rebuilding the foundations of the economy.  

The aim to make EU R&I policy systemic, strategic, transformative and so on is a good one. But R&D funding needs to sit within that wider goal, not be expected to drive it. Otherwise, the risk is that FP10 ends up half-baked, underfunded and misaligned, disappointing policymakers and researchers equally.

John Whitfield is the opinion editor at Research Professional News

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Advice for the UK’s new government from across the research and innovation world

To mark the election of a Labour government in the UK, Research Professional News asked writers from across research, innovation and higher education policy to set out their priorities for the incoming administration. Here we present a selection of those for European readers.

Jan Palmowski: Build links within Europe

In relation to the EU, the new UK government must focus on three linked priorities.

First, it must commit to association with Framework Programme 10, the successor to the current Horizon Europe R&D programme. Domestically, making higher education funding sustainable will be a top priority, but this cannot crowd out efforts to strengthen European and global links in research and innovation. We need our best minds to address our common challenges. For this, researchers and their institutions need long-term stability.

Second, rejoining Erasmus+ would be a perfect way to reset the relationship with the EU. At its core, Erasmus+ is about young people’s personal growth and fulfilment. The UK’s insistence on a financial rate of return from the programme always baffled Brussels. As well as benefiting students immeasurably, British participation in Erasmus+ would show that the UK sees itself again as part of the European family of nations.

These two actions would build trust and influence critical for a third domain—research security and intellectual property. One focus of the next framework programme will be shoring up Europe’s competitiveness and security in critical technologies. Questions about IP sharing, research security and protocols for international collaboration will become even more important.

Finding agreement and trust in these areas will take time. The sooner the UK and the EU start developing a common understanding and robust common protocols, the more transformative their collaboration in research and innovation—and higher education—can be.

Jan Palmowski is professor of modern history at the University of Warwick, UK. He will resume his role as secretary-general of the Guild of European Research-Intensive Universities on 1 August.

Andrew Morris: Lead on investment, make visas cheaper, boost NHS research

Britain is a world leader in innovation and health research. Labour must show the scientific community that it is committed to placing research and innovation at the heart of its mission-driven government to drive growth and improve lives. That should include a goal to lead the G7 in R&D investment. As it stands, UK R&D investment is not internationally competitive.

Success in research and innovation also means attracting skilled people from around the world, but at present international talent faces extortionate visa costs. A family of four coming to the UK to take up a PhD-level role on a five-year skilled worker visa faces up to £24,000 in upfront fees—far higher than in competitor nations.

This negates any claim to be open to international scientific talent; researchers, patients and the economy are paying the price. The new government should make turning the page on this damaging policy an urgent priority. 

The UK’s National Health Service is an unparalleled hub for medical research, delivering breakthroughs such as a Covid-19 vaccine. However, we’re not fully harnessing its power. Labour must commit to cultivating a new generation of leaders, including reversing the decline in clinical academics—the doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals who bridge universities and the NHS. By ringfencing staff time for research and reinvesting the income generated, we’ll keep the NHS at the forefront of medical innovation, improving patient care and powering economic growth.

Andrew Morris is president of the Academy of Medical Sciences.

Melanie Smallman: Embracing technology must not create inequality

Keir Starmer’s Labour government showed its commitment to science and innovation in its first few hours, appointing former chief scientific adviser Patrick Vallance as science minister and expanding the remit of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (Dsit) to include “transforming public service and fuelling economic growth”. Science should be all set, then.

The long-term funding commitments promised will bring much-needed stability. But given the real-terms cuts to science funding over past decades, there will be pressure to increase the pot. Maintaining access to Horizon Europe, as well as developing partnerships and joint funding vehicles, will be key to leveraging UK public money. And somehow, stability needs to be extended to higher education, wobbling with the current funding model.

Dsit’s trickiest task will be in its role as the centre of digital expertise and delivery. Digital innovation is a key driver of inequality in the UK, bringing growth to hub cities while leaving regional and non-university towns to make do with the low-paid, insecure platform jobs that their neighbours have created.

As machines replace people, tax returns fall, making public services even harder to fund. All this means that any rollout of artificial intelligence and digital technologies across government is likely to bring Dsit into conflict with other departments’ missions, particularly areas around the country.

Evaluating and monitoring the equality implications of new technologies will be vital. Starmer’s Council of Regions and Nations needs to be on the case; replicating the Blair and Brown governments’ focus on regional innovation and growth strategies might help.

Melanie Smallman is professor of science and technology studies at University College London and a former scientific adviser at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

Jim McDonald: Go big on industrial strategy

I am pleased that chancellor Rachel Reeves has declared economic growth the UK’s “national mission”. The engineering profession wants to see the new government take a holistic, long-term approach to complex challenges such as climate change and slow growth, creating strong policies on which to build sustainable economic growth, helping to improve lives. 

The nation needs an ambitious vision that draws on our strengths in engineering, innovation, research and manufacturing, underpinned by sustained policies that align actions across regulation, procurement, planning, funding, infrastructure, technology adoption and a national strategy for the engineering and technology workforce.

The UK already has a foothold in areas such as artificial intelligence, quantum and biotechnology. Adopting a long-term industrial strategy will help to leverage our impressive engineering and technology capabilities in these and other areas.

The National Engineering Policy Centre says the UK should aim to lead the G7 in R&D intensity, supporting and capitalising on its exceptional research base and leveraging private investment. We should also boost support for close-to-market R&D and demonstrator projects, as these are key stepping stones to commercialisation.

The UK should be a place where high-tech, innovative startups get access to the finance, facilities, infrastructure and talent they need to grow. Such companies are catalysts for change, helping to drive prosperity that can be shared across all regions, communities and groups in society.

Laying the foundations of productivity, economic growth and societal benefit requires policies that will work well beyond the next parliament. A strong and consistent industrial strategy is critical to the future success of this country; the engineering community stands ready to help.  

Jim McDonald is president of the Royal Academy of Engineering.

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The gap between the EU’s R&I funding and its ambition is in the spotlight again

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Back page gossip from the 4 July issue of Research Europe

In our former format as a PDF and flipbook, we ended the issue with a look back at what was taking place in research policy 10 years earlier—a tradition we may maintain in our new online approach.

By happy coincidence, or through shrewd planning, given that this issue has a feature on the European Research Council, the issue we ran 10 years ago had an interview with the then-ERC president, Jean-Pierre Bourguignon.

While the French mathematician would go on to have two stints at the top and a brief return as interim president, when we spoke to him a decade ago he had only been in the role for six months. He said then that the ERC was “functioning well…and my priority is simply to keep this up”.

Today, the funder remains the pride of EU research policy, although it is struggling in some ways from having a budget that is little increased from its €13 billion for 2014-20, as we explore in the new feature.

Also in his interview with us, Bourguignon was asked whether he would like a former scientist to be appointed commissioner in an upcoming process—much like the situation today as the end of the current European Commission political cycle approaches.

His reply was pragmatic: “A scientist who is stubborn and too focused on what they know could be really bad. A politician who takes their job seriously and understands how you can articulate research with other issues could be extremely positive,” he said. “The key point is: you need somebody who is willing to listen.”

At about the same time, we were reporting that a row had broken out at the EuroScience Open Forum over who was responsible for the EU’s diverging innovation leadership among its member states, and that the Commission was mulling changes to the EU’s support for ‘dual-use’ research with both civil and military potential.

Our format may have changed, but many of the EU’s research challenges are very familiar.

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Automating steering and coordination can free up human expertise, say Henry Sauermann and Maximilian Köhler

Discussions of artificial intelligence in academia have tended to focus on its impact on student learning and implications for admissions and exams. A less discussed but significant impact of AI lies in its transformative potential for research.

There are now many examples where AI has performed functional research tasks as a ‘worker’, augmenting the role of human scientists or taking over certain tasks. AI tools have been used to aid literature reviews, for example, while machine-learning models have predicted experimental outcomes.

Researchers are also leveraging AI to tackle many other time-consuming tasks. The ability of AI to process large datasets, identify patterns and make predictions is proving invaluable in fields ranging from biology to the social sciences.

The next frontier of AI in research goes beyond using it as a worker to perform functional tasks. AI is now helping to manage research projects, leading to a significant shift in how projects are organised and executed.

Identifying benefits

We have explored this algorithmic management in the context of crowd and citizen science, where non-expert volunteers are recruited for tasks such as data collection and analysis. These projects take a lot of managing—they are often quite large, involving a diverse pool of participants with different backgrounds, skills and motivations.

We studied more than 60 research projects, looking at where AI could assist with managerial tasks. We found more than a dozen projects that had implemented some form of algorithmic management and we identified five key areas—ones that have traditionally consumed much of principal investigators’ and project leaders’ time—in which AI can effectively manage research projects:

1.     Task allocation

Organisational goals such as developing a new drug are often too large and complex for a single worker. Managers need to break down these goals into subtasks and allocate them to individual workers. AI can efficiently match tasks to the right researchers, based on their skills, expertise and interests, ensuring that each task goes to the most suitable person. 

2.     Direction

Once tasks are assigned, managers typically provide guidance on how to perform them, including the sequence, timeframe and required accuracy. AI can assist in this by offering recommendations that prompt workers towards specific actions or by simplifying decision-making processes, thereby directing workers effectively. AI systems can also provide real-time feedback and guidance, ensuring that tasks are completed correctly and on time.

3.     Coordination

Teams need to be coordinated. Conventional coordination mechanisms include rules or time-consuming meetings. AI management tools can streamline this process. For example, AI can track progress, automatically alert one team member when another has completed a relevant prior task or simply coordinate implicitly when providing directions to team members on what to do and when. 

4.     Motivation

Motivating workers to perform their tasks is crucial. While financial incentives are common, other rewards such as intellectual challenge, social impact and peer recognition also play significant roles. AI can help tailor motivational strategies by understanding different workers’ motives. Additionally, AI can measure effort and performance in many types of task, allowing it to offer rewards in a timely and reliable manner. 

5.     Supporting learning

Helping workers learn and develop is essential for increasing productivity and building human capital. This involves initial training, tracking performance, identifying problems, giving feedback and assigning challenging tasks to foster new skills. Improving upon standardised approaches, AI can customise learning support to individual workers’ development needs and potential, enhancing overall effectiveness. 

AI’s ability to take over relatively routine management functions allows human leaders to focus on strategic and social tasks, such as identifying research targets, raising funding or building an effective organisational culture. Human managers provide the creativity, critical thinking and emotional intelligence that any successful research project needs.

Managing risks 

Although algorithmic management offers numerous benefits, it also presents potential risks. One concern is the restriction of worker autonomy when AI systems monitor and direct tasks. This level of oversight might lead to a more rigid work environment, stifling creativity and reducing job satisfaction.

Additionally, algorithmic management requires the collection and analysis of personal and behavioural data, raising privacy issues. There is also the risk of algorithmic bias, potentially affecting task allocation or the fair distribution of rewards.

Addressing these challenges requires awareness, improved technical solutions, robust ethical guidelines and appropriate data protection.

Integrating AI further into functional and managerial tasks has the potential to make research significantly more effective. Used responsibly, AI will enable researchers to conduct more research, to focus on the tasks they are truly passionate about and to make more of a difference through their work.

Henry Sauermann holds the chair in entrepreneurship at the European School of Management and Technology in Berlin, where Maximilian Köhler is a PhD student and research associate.

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Infrastructure and incentives for engaged research are still lacking, say Candice Carr Kelman and colleagues

There is no shortage of environmental and social problems to address in the world. These issues are often wickedly interconnected, demanding deep expertise, political will and collaboration between sectors.

Clearly there are important roles for scientists and scholars to play in addressing these pressing challenges—but for many experts based at universities, especially junior faculty, it often feels not just difficult but professionally risky to put in the time and effort to move into engaged scholarship.

Sometimes, early career researchers are advised to stick to publishing and wait until they get tenure before investing time in building relationships with those in the worlds of policy and practice, as these activities may not be as productive in terms of academic publications.

For a recently published paper, our team interviewed 71 conservation scientists about how they make their work actionable. We identified five levels of investment that scientists can make to produce actionable science, from simply making data accessible and communicating their findings through to networking, collaborating and producing value for society and science (see figure, below).

See full size

We also found that researchers who make the effort to move up these levels, engaging more deeply with society, find themselves facing significant extra workload. Unsurprisingly, the number of researchers at each level falls as engagement deepens.

Lack of incentives

While many universities like to congratulate faculty members who have made their science actionable, co-produced research with stakeholders and turned knowledge into outcomes, few offer meaningful incentives or services for faculty to truly engage and address important challenges, grand or small.

In fact, many junior faculty are discouraged from taking on engaged research, unless they are at institutions with explicitly social missions or disciplinary specialisms, such as agricultural universities. Whoever the relevant stakeholders are—farmers, conservation practitioners, villagers, healthcare providers—engaging with them takes significant amounts of time and effort.

Additionally, there are likely to be other products more useful to stakeholders than a peer-reviewed publication. But if relationships with stakeholders are built and maintained, researchers can be sure that their research questions, grant proposals and products will be relevant and valuable to people who can make practical use of the information being produced.

One problem with focusing on peer-reviewed publications as the coin of the realm of faculty promotion and tenure is that unless they are open access, they are beyond the reach of the public, including many non-profit and public service organisations. Even when such groups can access publications, they often struggle to find useful science in them. Universities should put their efforts behind the campaign to shift the focus of academic publishing from profits to public service.

Spanning boundaries, widening windows

There are two key ways for universities to support their researchers’ efforts to address today’s challenges. First, they should support engaged scholarship and actionable science by investing in the infrastructure, outreach, staff and faculty that can provide an interface between researchers and society.

Research centres should employ skilled convenors, facilitators and organisers able to support co-production of knowledge, facilitating communication and traffic between practitioners and academics. These boundary-spanning staff can help organisations find the right scientists to answer their questions about specific locations, species or social phenomena, and even facilitate collaborative grant-writing to fund applied research.

Second, universities must find fair and meaningful ways to value applied and engaged research. Tenure processes must be more inclusive of non-traditional research products such as maps, tools and reports, which have value even if they do not result in a peer-reviewed publication. Perhaps they helped win a court case, revise a policy or establish a new park. Our proposal for reforming tenure is about widening the window rather than raising or lowering the bar.

It would be a mistake to expect all professors to show both real-world impacts and peer-reviewed publications—not every discipline, or person, is naturally suited to this sort of work. We are also not suggesting that someone should get tenure without publishing at all.

Rather, we are suggesting that universities make their tenure criteria more inclusive of engaged scholarship and actionable research that can demonstrate positive impacts on the world. Some institutions, such as those in the Beyond the Academy sustainability network, are already doing this. To be truly effective, this approach must now become more widespread and pervasive.

Candice Carr Kelman, Simon Lhoest, Chris Barton, Jessica Beaudette and Leah Gerber are affiliated with the Center for Biodiversity Outcomes at Arizona State University in the US.

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Shifting EU politics mustn’t undermine R&D, say Mari Sundli Tveit, Javier Moreno-Fuentes and Marcel Levi

After four days of voting by some 450 million citizens, the fear that the European elections would produce a seismic shift towards the far right failed to materialise in full. Even so, while the main pro-EU parties of the centre right and left have gained enough seats to renew their grand coalition, it is still unclear what alliances far-right parties will form and what influence they might wield over EU policy

Following the results, current European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen spoke of “building a broad coalition” to act as a “bastion against the extremes”. Yet while the centre-right European People’s Party secured the most seats, bolstering von der Leyen’s bid for a second term as Commission president, the rise of a far-right opposition will pose challenges. We may well see the emergence of a more flexible, case-by-case political majority, beholden on specific issues to a strategic and emboldened ideological fringe. 

This more polarised parliament is likely to make it more difficult to pass legislation and budgetary proposals on issues such as climate, immigration, trade and defence spending. It may come at the expense of the legislative agenda for the green transition—centre stage in EU policy before. 

Achieving these objectives depends on Europe strengthening its competitiveness in research and innovation. Hence, increased political contention around spending, mobility, data security, the green transition and academic freedom, may impact EU support for research.

Importantly, the incoming parliament will set the agenda for the next R&I Framework Programme following Horizon Europe’s conclusion in 2027. The next College of Commissioners, and those appointed to key positions in the European Parliament, must support both research and science-informed policymaking when forming the EU’s new legislative agenda. 

Delivering a democratic, economically competitive, culturally vibrant and environmentally conscious Europe, while benefitting from technological advancements, demands research environments with robust funding, protections for academic freedom, mobility and international collaboration.

Budget and balance

Research and innovation spending is an investment. Doubling the budget for the next Framework Programme to the €200 billion needed is essential to deliver groundbreaking discoveries and maintain a leading position in science and technology. The increased funding would support both large-scale projects and smaller, high-risk initiatives, all with the potential to deliver significant advances. A larger budget would enable the EU to address global challenges more effectively, from climate change to health crises, while finally achieving its decade-old commitment to spending 3 per cent of GDP on R&I.

A thriving research environment requires a delicate balance between fundamental and applied research. Fundamental research is the bedrock upon which applied and collaborative research turn scientific discoveries into practical solutions, driving economic growth, cultural development and a better quality of life. 

The next Framework Programme must ensure the whole research value chain receives attention and funding, particularly as the European Commission explores dual-use research, potentially increasing the emphasis on work with both civil and military applications. 

Close the gap

The performance gap in research and innovation capabilities between member states is a significant challenge that erodes the EU’s collective effectiveness. Bridging this gap requires targeted measures to support underperforming areas, such as increased funding, infrastructure development and capacity-building initiatives. 

A more inclusive research environment can help the EU to unlock potential and create a more balanced and competitive research landscape. This approach ensures all 27 member states can contribute to and benefit from European science.

By doubling the Framework Programme budget, balancing fundamental and applied research, addressing the performance gap, and carefully considering dual-use research, the EU can secure its position as a global leader in culture, science and technology. Without these measures, that position is anything but assured. 

As the European Parliament shapes these policies, Science Europe will continue to advocate for a research environment
that is inclusive, ethical, equitable and open, for Europe to thrive on an increasingly competitive and dynamic world stage, while continuing to protect the shared values that have defined the successes already achieved. 

Mari Sundli Tveit is chief executive of the Research Council of Norway and president of Science Europe. Javier Moreno Fuentes is vice-president for international affairs at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and vice-president of Science Europe. Marcel Levi is president of the Dutch Research Council (NWO) and vice-president of Science Europe.

This article also appeared in Research Europe

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Back page gossip from the 20 June issue of Research Europe

Parsing the poll

Across Europe this past fortnight, all other stories and situations have played second fiddle to the European Parliament election.

As we report on our cover, the overall result of the election was one of limited change. The centre-right European People’s Party group remains the largest, with 26.4 per cent of the 720 seats; the centre-left Socialists and Democrats group retains second place on 18.9 per cent; and the centrist Renew Europe group vied for third with 11.1 per cent.

Together, these three groups won 406 seats in the preliminary count, but there could yet be movement of national parties between groups or newfound affiliations for non-attached MEPs. This was 45 seats more than the 361 needed to form a majority and to therefore be able to approve whoever is nominated to become the next president of the European Commission.

Below this headline level, however, there was plenty of concern about the significantly increased success of right-wing politicians.

The European Conservatives and Reformists group and the Identity and Democracy group won 11.5 per cent and 8.1 per cent of the seats respectively, up from 9.8 per cent and 7 per cent in the 2019-24 Parliament.

In addition, the share of non-attached and non-aligned MEPs increased in the provisional results, largely due to the success of more MEPs who are ultimately expected to join right-wing groups.

Furthermore, a right-wing group won the biggest or joint-biggest share of seats in four countries—Austria, France, Italy and Latvia—while in Hungary and Slovakia the top share was taken by non-attached MEPs.

Philippe Legrain, a former adviser to then Commission president José Manuel Barroso and now a visiting senior fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science’s European Institute, wrote in an article for the media organisation Project Syndicate that the results showed “complacency is dangerous” for EU backers.

The far right could co-opt the centre right, he warned, suggesting that this has already happened with the EU’s approach to asylum seekers, which has shifted from a welcoming stance to one of “universal hostility”.

An alternative to attempting to appease the far right is to tackle it head-on, which France’s president Emmanuel Macron appears to be doing with his decision to hold a national election in the wake of the far right’s strong results in his country in the European poll.

As we report, this is already having implications for research in France, where higher education and research minister Sylvie Retailleau could lose her post.

So while the overall result is unlikely to change much for research and innovation at the EU level, there could well be impacts at the national level—and the political trends for society more broadly provide much food for thought.

One bright spot of the European election was the voter turnout: although still low compared with national polls, it rose slightly to 51 per cent. 

Again, this masked a highly diverse picture in the various nations, with turnout highest in Belgium at a whopping 89.8 per cent and lowest in Croatia at just 21.4 per cent.

The post Inside out appeared first on Research Professional News.

Parliamentary continuity and a fresh look for Research Europe

The European Parliament elections have, in some ways, ended in welcome familiarity for research and innovation. 

The overall balance of the Parliament is broadly unchanged. The centre-right European People’s Party group remains the largest, with just over 26 per cent of the 720 seats. The centre-left Socialists and Democrats group stays in second place while third place remains in contention.

For a sector that continues to rely on MEPs staving off the worst attempts by national governments to cut research budgets, this is good news—particularly with negotiations looming over the EU’s next long-term budget: the Multiannual Financial Framework due to start in 2028. 

This sense of familiarity may be strengthened further by the return of Ursula von der Leyen as European Commission president, should EU political leaders approve her reappointment. European Council talks this week ended without resolution, adjourning discussions until next week. But the relatively steady makeup of the Parliament, with von der Leyen’s European People’s Party group most dominant, makes her reselection more likely.

While the headline picture is one of broad stability, the rise of the far right shown by the election results in numerous countries—including France—highlights the volatility of the overall political environment, with deeply concerning implications for research. 

Philippe Legrain, a former adviser to the European Commission president, warned this week that “complacency is dangerous” for EU backers. The same can definitely be said for those in the R&I sector. 

The rise of right-wing populism in national politics could have a significant bearing on countries’ willingness to invest large sums of money in EU programmes, including R&I. It will also fuel growing concerns about the security of academic freedom.

Against this backdrop, the research sector will need to look to familiar faces in EU institutions—but also seek out sympathetic new ones—to help ensure an environment for R&I that can remain strong amid Europe’s increasing political volatility.

A new look for Research Europe

Speaking of change and continuity, readers will notice some differences to Research Europe from the next edition. We are delighted to be launching a redesigned email alert, with a more impactful design to complement the in-depth research policy news, analysis and commentary that our readers have valued for decades. 

Meanwhile, a new, dedicated Research Europe section on our website will house all of the content from the latest edition in one place, with an archive listing for the articles in each issue. These changes will replace the flipbook format and will enable us to dedicate more resources to bringing you the most up-to-date news and thought-provoking commentary on the opportunities and challenges facing the research community today. 

Research Europe emails will continue to reach you every two weeks in termtime, and you can also sign up for our daily European and international news coverage, included in your subscription. 

We hope you like our new look; if you have any feedback, we’d love to hear from you.  

This article also appeared in Research Europe 

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Counting publications does not build equity, integrity and value, say Ismael Rafols and Louise Bezuidenhout

Following a flurry of policies to foster open science, we are seeing a wave of efforts to monitor its development. There is even a monitor for monitoring: the French Open Science Monitoring Initiative. This gathers information from different countries and institutions, as well as proposing general principles for monitoring open science–also the subject of a recently launched Unesco consultation.

So far, monitoring has focused on tracking uptake of open-science policies and outputs, particularly publications and data. But this is like trying to understand fungi by counting mushrooms: it misses what’s going on beneath the surface, the network of activity and interaction that underpins the visible result.

Open science is not just about changing the practices of research, but also its motivations and values. It encompasses much besides publishing, from public engagement to evaluation. Focusing on what is easy to count means neglecting these activities that foster equity and share benefits with society.

Beyond missing important aspects of open science, narrowly focused monitoring can have damaging unintended consequences.

Perverse incentives

For example, more open access publications might seem like progress, as it means that more information is freely accessible. However, if openness depends on pay-to-publish models, this creates inequality, as researchers who cannot afford publication charges become less visible. It may also lead to unscrupulous publishers weakening reviewing processes to increase economic gains.

These effects weigh more heavily on researchers in marginalised scholarly communities and places, meaning that output-centred monitoring both undermines the values of open science and weakens poorer research systems. More generally, it reinforces a publish-or-perish system focused on quantity, instead of supporting slow and thoughtful knowledge creation for meaningful purposes—the deeper transformation needed to connect science and society. Lay readers should not have to sort through an ever-growing jungle of research outputs.

Similar problems afflict data sharing: there is little evidence of meaningful reuse of datasets on a large scale, outside of a few disciplines such as genomics; issues of quality control are poorly understood; and storage and long-term curation remain problematic. So, unless open data is intended solely as fodder for artificial intelligence models, counting datasets does not lead to meaningful insights.

Current monitoring efforts can be useful, but their narrowness may result in engagement activities and the uses and benefits of open science being overlooked. Deeper efforts that embrace context and values are needed for open science to live up to its promises of fostering research that makes the world a better place.

Learning from history

For this, first, indicators need to specify their particular route to open science. For example, each form of open access publishing needs its own indicator, since each has different normative implications. Gold, diamond and green open access should not be aggregated in a single measure.

Second, ending monitoring at the point of creation or engagement says nothing about their effects, the outcomes: it is important to track the effects of open science policies, thinking about who bears the costs and who reaps the benefits.

One way to conceive of open science is as a system of connections. This foregrounds its relational aspects, highlighting the centrality of collaboration and co-creation, and the aim of building responsive and responsible global research communities. The Unesco Open Science Outlook published in 2023 calls for “a focus on the people who are doing, engaging with and/or benefiting from science”.

History holds lessons for how to monitor such processes. The OECD Frascati Manual, devised in 1963, sets out measures of science, technology and innovation based on tracking inputs and outputs. Yet this approach failed to capture the processes, drivers and outcomes of innovation, so in 1992 the OECD launched a complementary approach, the Oslo Manual, based on surveying companies.

Mapping connections

Similarly, for open science, monitoring needs to show the connections between researchers and stakeholders, along with behavioural changes and underlying motivations. Surveys are the main method for capturing this type of information.

Open science monitoring, in other words, needs a pluralistic approach, possibly based on surveys and narratives, that links practices to value-driven outcomes. Such a shift would be in line with the movement in research assessment away from journal impact factors and citations towards narrative accounts of impact.

If open science is a systemic transformation of the research system, including its values, its monitoring needs strategies to match. If open science is about more than just producing accessible and reproducible research, but rather about effecting meaningful change in science, we need strategies to track the contribution towards collective benefits, integrity and equity in science.

Ismael Rafols is Unesco chair on diversity and inclusion in global science at Leiden University, and Louise Bezuidenhout is senior researcher at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies, Leiden University. The centre is hosting webinars to discuss monitoring open science on 21 June (14:00 CET) and 28 June (15:00 CET).

A version of this article also appeared in Research Europe

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Blunt refusal to fund next-generation particle accelerator should prompt lab to rethink, says John Womersley

The particle physics community found itself in something of a tizzy last month, after a German government representative made unprecedentedly negative public comments about plans by Europe’s particle physics laboratory Cern for a next-generation particle accelerator.  

The intervention from Cern’s single largest contributor, paying 21 per cent of the lab’s roughly SFr1.4 billion (€1.2bn) annual budget, was both very blunt and very public, being made at a meeting of German particle physicists, with slides posted online. The Future Circular Collider (FCC), says the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, “has to be considered as not affordable” and “Germany is not in a position to provide the planned funding”.   

Germany has, I’m told, already made this point privately in Cern’s council. I suspect the ministry felt the message hadn’t hit home.  

The FCC is conceived as a larger successor, roughly 90km in circumference, to the highly successful Large Hadron Collider. It would be built in two stages: the first (FCC-ee) to probe the properties of the Higgs boson discovered in 2012 by the LHC, the second (FCC-hh) opening up new territory by colliding protons at energies roughly seven times higher than the LHC.  

Scientifically and strategically, this is an extremely attractive plan. The challenges are technical, financial and sociological. 

The tunnel, estimated to cost SFr6bn, would be expensive but not technically unprecedented. The magnets needed to collide the particles for the second phase are a different story: technically risky, requiring significant R&D, and with a high and uncertain cost.

Updated estimates have not been released, but an earlier phase of the design study estimated SFr12bn for FCC-ee. Even if Cern devoted close to half its funds to the project, building this within its present budget could take 20 years. It would also require significant borrowing to smooth the cash flow.

It’s complicated…  

I know from my time running a multinational scientific facility, in this case the European Spallation Source in Sweden, that Germany’s federal prohibition on borrowing creates issues with such financing. This may explain some of the unhappiness.  

The choice of a 90km tunnel is partly a down payment on FCC-hh, projected to cost an additional SFr17bn. Germany, and others, may be wary of doing anything that looks like pre-approving such a massively expensive follow-on project.  

The sociological challenge lies in the project’s timescales. Cern plans to run the LHC until 2041, and is currently upgrading the facility under the High-Luminosity LHC project. FCC-ee could not start before 2045 and FCC-hh not before the 2070s. These dates look depressingly remote, especially to younger scientists.  

Many have looked to alternatives, such as a muon collider—a riskier proposition but one offering many interesting projects in the next few years. Cern has the resources to pursue this option, but its natural home would be the US’s Fermilab.

The FCC team has tried to put a positive spin on Germany’s reservations, but this looks increasingly silly. It would be better to listen and rethink.

Contacts tell me that the FCC could find cost savings of 10 or even 20 per cent. Coupled with a general belt-tightening, this should enable a credible plan within Cern’s existing budget.

Budget challenges   

Contributions from other countries, notably the United States, are also part of the solution. Cern recently signed a memorandum of understanding with the US government allowing contributions to the FCC. These, however, are unlikely to be huge: the US Department of Energy is making a very large investment in the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, and the National Science Foundation faces big budget challenges. Many Cern member states would also expect the two host nations, France and Switzerland, to step up, given so much of the construction budget would be spent in their territories.  

Second, cutting short the High-Luminosity LHC’s operations could assuage younger scientists’ concerns about the schedule. The FCC will supersede many of the LHC’s measurements, and once its capacity to discover new phenomena has been exhausted, the FCC should take precedence.  

Pooling resources   

Cern is a great institution precisely because it pools resources and allows long-term commitments. But, like any big institution, it needs a realistic vision for the future to keep member states, staff and scientific users engaged. The FCC is not quite there yet.

Cern’s next director-general, to be appointed in December, must treat this problem as a top priority, and be very tough on cost and schedule. The laboratory’s future may depend upon it.  

John Womersley is a special advisor to the College of Science and Engineering, University of Edinburgh, and a visiting professor at the University of Oxford

This article also appeared in Research Europe

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Buffers against economic and political turbulence can be built into project support, says Hannah Ngugi

Eyoab Iyasu, an Eritrean molecular biologist, was two decades into his research career before he won his first grant. The award, from Human Heredity and Health in Africa (H3Africa), an international genomics research initiative, supported him to join the Tuberculosis Genetics Network in Africa, a consortium made up of institutions in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan and Cameroon. 

With the funding, Iyasu’s team at the Eritrea Institute of Technology has conducted the first whole-genome sequencing of Eritrean populations. The lab can now carry out DNA extractions and PCR analyses that previously had to be sent abroad at greater expense. And by giving students access to lab equipment, it promises to revolutionise the teaching of molecular biology in Eritrea.

According to the World Bank, 70 per cent of Eritreans live below the poverty line, making it one of the world’s poorest countries. In such nations, researchers face a Catch-22 situation. They need investment to build the infrastructural capacity that funders demand, but funders will only support institutions that already have this capacity.

Funders’ reluctance is heightened by political and economic meltdowns, fluctuating exchange rates, and rules around currency transfers. Some nations, for example, require funding to be received in local currency, making reagents and equipment that must be bought in a foreign currency more expensive. In some places, even opening bank accounts can be difficult or impossible. 

Local and international restrictions mean research programmes take longer to implement, increasing both costs and exposure to economic fluctuations. Political instability puts investments and projects at risk of interruption or worse.

The effort of engaging in such challenging environments can create funder fatigue, prompting a turn towards countries with more hospitable research systems, regulations and economic frameworks. But good science can come from anywhere.

Most in need

Unfortunately, the places most lacking in research funds are often those that need them most, and a society’s own people are the ones best placed to solve its challenges. Rather than imposing their frameworks and culture, the job of funders is to support researchers to take their own approaches.

Over the years, the Science For Africa Foundation has found ways to fund research in politically and economically challenging environments. Much of this involves bolstering the continent’s science ecosystem and institutional governance through promoting efficient research and grant management, and other support, such as financial services. 

For the H3Africa consortium, for example, the foundation, which implements Wellcome’s contribution to the programme, managed funds in-house throughout the implementation period. Similarly, in some West African nations where research funding has to be paid in euros, we have negotiated an arrangement where the foundation receives the funds, giving grantees stability by enabling them to hedge against the volatility of local currencies.

Where lead institutions cannot transfer funds to partners, we have paid suppliers directly. And we have facilitated direct payments to suppliers in Europe, saving researchers the expense of currency transfers. This is not ideal—it’s better when funds and accountability reside directly with the researcher— but it’s important not to make the perfect the enemy of good.

Working in these countries requires continuous monitoring and adaptation, reviewing research programmes regularly and adjusting to changing conditions on the ground. When Sudan was plunged into conflict, for example, we helped Iyasu’s partners at the University of Khartoum move their work to Ethiopia.

Funding and management 

Over time, we believe that by combining funding for research with support for good financial management, we can help more African institutions build the environments and infrastructure needed for high-quality research. 

Enabling African countries to achieve their scientific potential is a long-term investment. The SFA Foundation is not avoiding difficult regulatory environments, but bringing our experience and skills to help build resilience and allow countries to face their internal problems. Other funders can do the same.

By doing so, they can equitably promote science and strengthen low-resource research institutions, advancing science in Africa and strengthening each country’s systems, policies, places and, most importantly, people. The struggles make successes like Iyasu’s all the more sweeter. 

Hannah Ngugi is head of finance, grants and procurement at the Science for Africa Foundation, based in Nairobi

This article also appeared in Research Europe

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The stakes are high for research as Europe goes to the polls

What happens at polling stations around Europe over the next few days will determine the shape of the EU’s policymaking institutions for the next five years—and the stakes for research are huge.

As balloting for the European Parliament got underway, the European University Association made a last-minute plea for universities to encourage staff and students to vote. Turnouts in such elections tend to be low, belying their significance in determining EU policy. 

The plea is based on democratic engagement: as the EUA’s Anna-Lena Claeys-Kulik puts it: “We are not telling people [how] to vote, but why it is important.” Even so, there’s no question that a high turnout from academics and students—who as a group tend to lean to the left politically—would be considered helpful by those worried about the impact of a predicted rightwards drift on research and higher education policy.

This week, some academic commentators suggested that this shift to the right might not be as strong as previously predicted, with an analysis published by the Institute for European Policymaking at Bocconi University in Italy forecasting that while “the next Parliament will be considerably more right-leaning than the current one”, centrist parties will win slightly more seats than previously expected. 

Nonetheless, any shift in power towards far-right parties that typically favour a smaller EU budget would not bode well for research and innovation, at a time when not only the remaining budget of Horizon Europe but also the scope of its successor programme are up for debate.

Over recent days, numerous R&I groups have renewed calls for the next programme to have a budget of €200 billion, more than double that of Horizon Europe. The high volume of research proposals deemed excellent that are going unfunded due to constrained budgets is a well-documented problem. For the EU to use R&I effectively in the challenges it faces—including the green and digital transitions—it needs a spending pot that captures much more of this wasted potential.

But as Science Europe secretary-general Lidia Borrell-Damián underscores this week (see cover), hopes for the next Parliament, and the new European Commission that will be formed after the vote with MEPs’ approval, must “go beyond requests to increase investment” in R&I. 

Among the string of critical issues Borrell-Damián outlines, ensuring freedom of scientific inquiry feels particularly resonant against a shifting political backdrop. 

Last month, a survey in Sweden commissioned by the country’s education minister revealed that almost a third of researchers—29 per cent—considered political interference a challenge to academic freedom. Ironically, as more politicians hone in on universities over free speech and ‘cancel culture’—the issues that prompted the Swedish review—this sense of interference is growing.

The sector’s lobbying efforts in relation to all these issues must intensify, not recede, once the new Parliament is in place. For R&I, this week’s votes are just the end of the beginning. 

This article also appeared in Research Europe

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Back page gossip from the 6 June issue of Research Europe

 A fond farewell

Research Europe would like to wish a fond farewell to Johannes Bahrke, who has left his post as the European Commission’s coordinating spokesperson for research and innovation after more than seven years in the role. We have interacted with Johannes many times over the years and appreciate all of the assistance he has provided.

One of the more frequent matters on which we exchanged emails was the overarching issue of whether the Commission cares to “comment on comment”—ie, respond to criticism that has been levelled at it. “You know we don’t comment on the comments of others,” Johannes stressed to us on one such occasion. “We, of course, reply on the substance of our proposals and policies.”

In response, we pointed out that it is good journalistic practice to give the subject of criticism the chance to respond, and that even if it declines to comment on criticism the Commission might choose to provide useful background information instead.

It was all in good spirits, and Johannes went on to provide many a helpful reply over the subsequent years. He is now going to be joining the EU representative in the United States as a “digital counsellor”.

We wish him all the best in his new role and hope he now feels free to comment on whatever he chooses.

Shaping policy

We report concerns among some politicians in the United States that oil companies have undertaken a “decades-long disinformation campaign to mislead the public about the climate effects of fossil fuels…similar [to] cases involving the tobacco and pharmaceutical industries”.

Closer to home, the non-profit organisation InfluenceMap, which says it exists to provide “evidence-based analysis of how companies and financial institutions are impacting the climate and biodiversity crises”, published a report that took such claims as a given.

Looking at how the agriculture sector may have influenced EU climate policies, the report said that “meat and dairy producers, and the industry associations that represent them, use a combination of strategic narrative building and policy engagement that mirrors the tactics of the fossil fuel industry to obstruct climate policy tackling the sector’s emissions”.

Lest there be any doubt about what the report was accusing, it continued: “Both sectors employ similar misleading narratives through strategic public messaging to sow doubt and undermine the need to tackle greenhouse gas emissions.”

One agriculture association “consistently questioned the science on agriculture’s contribution to methane emissions between 2021-23”, according to the report. As evidence it linked to a statement shared by some associations in 2022 which said that linking meat production to climate change via methane emissions was “simplistic”.

That industry and other actors seek to influence policymaking is in no doubt. Whether such influence takes the form of “disinformation” that is “misleading” is rather more complicated to determine—which, of course, is where independent scientific advice comes into its own.

The post Inside out appeared first on Research Professional News.

Brussels must give stellar early-career funding more autonomy, say Mattias Björnmalm and Manuel Heitor

Since their inception in 1996, the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions have supported more than 145,000 researchers. Eighteen have gone on to win Nobel prizes, including Emmanuelle Charpentier for her co-discovery of the Crispr gene-editing technology. Stefan Hell, who won the 2014 Nobel prize for chemistry, has called the MSCA Individual Fellowship he was granted in 1996 “a critical moment in my career”.

The programme has been particularly successful in promoting gender equality, with women making up over 42 per cent of MSCA fellows under Horizon 2020, way above the average EU research population.

Yet despite its achievements, the MSCA remains underappreciated and undervalued. It is often perceived as merely a mobility programme, but it is much more than that. It is also underfunded, with currently only one in every six high-scoring, excellent proposals winning support. This harms research in Europe and its ability to attract and retain world-class talent.

It is time to change this narrative and give the MSCA the recognition it deserves. For nearly three decades, the programme has been a trendsetter, providing immense value for Europe by funding the training, mobility, and career development of researchers at all stages of their careers. The scheme should be recognised as the EU’s premier instrument for research training and research careers, and its full potential needs to be unlocked.

Positive impact

In its 2 May 2024 draft conclusions on the Horizon 2020 R&D programme, the Council of the EU acknowledged the MSCA’s positive impact on the quality of science, training, career development, and working conditions of researchers. This recognition is important, but much more is needed.

The wider policy landscape is not without its tensions. Despite being fundamentally a bottom-up initiative, the programme sits within the main work programme of the European Commission; this translates top-down political priorities into funding calls, which sit uncomfortably with a bottom-up approach. 

Current discussions in Brussels include potential structural changes to the MSCA. Some of these, such as integration into the Erasmus+ student mobility programme or concentration on specific fields of research, could damage the programme’s impact. This underlines the need for informed debate about the future of the MSCA.

A position paper by Cesaer, published on 14 May 2024, includes a call to substantially boost the MSCA and its capacity to advance research careers. One key proposal is to enhance the research community’s participation in the programme’s governance, strategic planning and oversight. 

Policymakers should consider enhancing the research community’s active and independent participation in MSCA governance. This should encompass a new task force to foster research careers in Europe, recommended by the Council of the EU in May 2021, but still awaiting action.

A new council? 

A ‘Marie Skłodowska-Curie Council’, inspired by the success of the European Research Council, could be set up to run the MSCA. It also needs a boost to its budget, which has been relatively modest, at around €1.3 billion annually, including UK contributions. Half of this goes on large international networks of doctoral studentships, including those with industry. A third goes on postdoctoral fellowships. The programme also funds staff exchanges and co-funds doctoral and postdoctoral programmes, also with industry. 

The research community needs to stimulate scientific activism throughout Europe to help citizens better understand the European values of research and innovation, including freedom of thought and the need for adequate incentives for research training and careers. 

The MSCA has been a beacon for European research and a source of inspiration for early-career and young talent worldwide. It has fostered a sense of European values and collaboration among institutions and researchers, breaking down barriers and promoting a culture of shared knowledge. 

It has been instrumental in attracting young talents to come to Europe to do research, advancing the frontiers of knowledge. It should be freed from constraints, corporate and nationalist interests in Brussels, and build on its success, so it can play an even larger role in the research landscape.

In conclusion, the MSCA is one of the EU’s best funding instruments. Let’s work together to unleash its full potential and give future generations more opportunities for freely chosen research, advanced training, and research careers in Europe. 

Mattias Björnmalm is secretary-general of the Cesaer group of universities of science and technology. Manuel Heitor is Cesaer Envoy for Research Careers and a professor at the University of Lisbon Instituto Superior Técnico.

This article also appeared in Research Europe

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Support must evolve to meet growing threats to academic freedom, says Maike Didero

The number of scholars who face repression and risk in their home countries, as well as the number of these scholars who apply for support opportunities in Europe, has risen substantially in the past few years. 

A study published in December 2023 found that up to 18 per cent of all Ukrainian researchers have left the country since Russia‘s full-scale invasion in 2022. But the surge in scholars seeking support started earlier. 

The Scholars at Risk (SAR) network has seen an exceptional rise in applications since 2021, with 1,400 coming from Afghanistan in that year alone. Today, SAR still receives a high number of applications from that country, along with from Palestine, Ukraine, Sudan and Iran. 

This surge is connected to the recent wave of war and armed conflict in Ukraine, Africa and the Middle East. More broadly, however, the Free to Think report 2023 and the Academic Freedom Index update 2024 show that academic freedom is declining in many countries, related to a global rise in authoritarianism. Researchers are a key target for governments attempting to suppress open intellectual discourse and civil liberties. 

Support programmes for researchers at risk are working hard to respond to these worrying trends. There is a wide range of approaches, including government-backed programmes such as the Philipp  Schwartz Initiative funded by the German Federal Foreign Office and the PAUSE programme for scientists and artists in exile run by the Collège de France. 

Other support structures are provided through individual higher education institutions or national sections of the SAR in cooperation with national research funding or development agencies. The Scholar Rescue Fund, SAR, and the Council for At-Risk Academics in the UK (Cara) each place significant numbers of scholars at European universities.

A report published last month on national-level activities in Europe, compiled by the Humboldt Foundation and the Pause programme, reflects on these programmes’ achievements and efforts across the continent. The new report was written on behalf of the EU-funded Inspireurope+ Consortium, which helps different support schemes for at-risk scholars coordinate their activities and learning. 

Despite differences in programme setup, stakeholders agree on several crucial points for successful support initiatives. There needs to be a good fit between the researcher at risk and his or her academic host, along with academic mentoring, administrative and social support, and opportunities and financial resources for continued professional development. Lastly, displaced researchers need time to adapt and integrate into a new, highly competitive academic environment. 

Many exiled researchers aim to return to their home country. However, wars and authoritarian regimes often persist for longer than expected. Sustainable support therefore needs to consider long-term perspectives. 

Solidarity and support

At the national level, solidarity and support opportunities have mushroomed, particularly since Russia invaded Ukraine. Initiatives and programmes have been set up for Afghan, Iranian and Ukrainian researchers, including some at a more local level that complement longstanding schemes administered by national bodies. 

On an EU level, the MSCA4Ukraine scheme, established as a crisis response within Horizon Europe’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions, has recently received additional funding. Last year, the Commission also called for proposals for a broader European fellowship scheme for researchers at risk from non-EU countries. Both initiatives are part of a trend towards stronger commitments to academic freedom at the European level. Unfortunately, many crisis-response programmes are limited in their resources and duration. Some have been discontinued, while other have narrowed to specific recipients.

To be sustainable, support for at-risk scholars must be reliable and long-term, while also meeting the need for flexible schemes offering emergency support during crises.

Support programmes, funders, policymakers and institutions should continue to coordinate efforts to ensure a streamlined approach to support services, joining forces in defence of academic freedom and to meet the needs of researchers at risk. 

 Researchers at risk bring skills and attributes that can enhance research and innovation in Europe. If Europe gave them the support they need, on the scale that the world’s crises demand, it would be a milestone. 

Maike Didero is programme director for Inspireurope+, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation

This article also appeared in Research Europe

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Research funders, as well as governments, need to step up on AI

For the second time in seven months, world leaders have come together to attempt to address concerns over the safe and equitable use of artificial intelligence. 

But while this week’s meeting in Seoul, South Korea, acknowledged AI’s “unprecedented advancements and the impact on our economies and societies”, there is continuing—and deepening—concern that the pace of governments’ responses to the risks posed by AI is failing to keep up with its development.

A consensus paper published on 21 May by 25 AI scientists suggested that “insufficient” progress had been made since the first summit, held at the UK’s Bletchley Park in November. As co-author Philip Torr of the University of Oxford put it: “It is time to go from vague proposals to concrete commitments.”

The EU took a step towards such commitments this week by effectively signing off its AI Act: legislation intended to support the development and use of trustworthy AI technologies. In a phrase whose familiar echoes might not look out of place in a ChatGPT-generated speech, EU internal market commissioner Thierry Breton said the bloc was “regulating as little as possible and as much as needed”.

While the act itself is not intended to regulate the development of AI for use in scientific R&D, the need for better checks and balances on AI in this area, tailored to and emanating from within the sector, is becoming increasingly apparent. Just like in the wider world, responses in the sector are lagging behind both emerging risks and emerging opportunities. 

EU guidelines for using generative AI in research, set out in March, offered an encouraging start. However, as we explore on P8, the extent to which individual governments—and crucially, national research funders—have engaged with the repercussions of the use of AI in the sector varies considerably. 

The biggest consensus is around the reviewing of grant proposals. National funders in Finland, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden are among those that have explicitly forbidden the use of AI in the review of research funding applications. In doing so, they will hope to avoid the kind of situation that occurred in Australia last year, when the apparent use of generative AI by a peer reviewer sparked a maelstrom of concern over credibility and confidentiality. 

But this consensus is not universal, and even funders that have put such guidelines in place have tended to do so on the basis of confidentiality rather than as a specific response to AI. Meanwhile, the situation around the use of AI in grant applications is even less directive: beyond the EU guidance and some requests for transparency, there is little provided from funders by way of advice to applicants.

Does this level of intervention represent, to echo Breton and many others, “as little as possible and as much as needed”? With AI exponentially increasing the risk of research fraud, and the European Research Council recently warning that authors must take full responsibility for the content of their research, it’s likely that both funders and researchers will find themselves seeking out more prescription rather than less. 

This article also appeared in Research Europe

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Back page gossip from the 23 May issue of Research Europe

Eurovision debate

Later today, a big Eurovision debate will be grabbing many policy watchers’ attention.

No, not the controversy about the Eurovision Song Contest banning the waving of EU flags inside the venue for the finale of the hugely popular all-singing, all-dancing extravaganza. The European Broadcasting Union explained that this was because, according to its rules, only flags of participating nations and LGBTQI+ pride flags are allowed.

This was the case previously, too, but there have been suggestions that this year the rule was enforced for the first time to prevent people waving flags to support one or other side in the Gaza conflict. EU leaders were not happy, with European Commission vice-president Margaritis Schinas writing to the EBU to complain: “With the EU being targeted by malicious and authoritarian actors, EBU’s decision contributed to discrediting a symbol that brings together all Europeans.” 

No, the Eurovision debate that EU politicians will be hoping attracts even half as many viewers as the song contest is one between the lead candidates to become the next president of the Commission. 

On 23 May, incumbent president Ursula von der Leyen, of the European People’s Party, will take part in a discussion together with four confirmed competitors in the plenary chamber of the European Parliament, which will be called on to approve a new president.

In theory, the winner should come from whichever party wins the most seats in the 6-9 June Parliament election. And in theory, they should therefore be one of the five candidates taking part in the debate.

In practice, the heads of government in the European Council will probably nominate whoever they feel like, whether they were selected to campaign or not, and then hope to bend the Parliament to their will in getting them appointed. That’s what they did last time around in selecting von der Leyen, of course.

But von der Leyen has a decent chance of winning their backing again, and the 23 May debate is a chance for her to show them, MEPs and (hopefully) millions of European citizens watching at home that she deserves a second term at the top of EU policymaking.

As it happens, the EBU is organising the debate, so perhaps it’s no coincidence that it has the same name as the song contest. The candidates will debate six key topics, although it has cunningly doubled up on all of them. They are: economy and jobs, defence and security, climate and environment, democracy and leadership, migration and borders, and innovation and technology.

“The Eurovision Debate is an important moment to get to know the lead candidates and their parties’ platforms,” said EBU news director Liz Corbin. No argument from us, but we suggest it might be even more exciting if countries or their heads of government scored the performers afterwards for the world to see, as they do in the song contest of the same name. 

Speaking of which, the EBU also replied to Schinas’s concerns. Its director-general Noel Curran said: “We wish to assure you that it was never our intention to discredit the EU flag as such an important symbol of European unity and solidarity, and we will be sure to revisit our policy for next year.” 

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Influx of far-right MEPs promises tighter purse strings and post-truth grandstanding, says John Whitfield

In his 2022 book The Revenge of Power, the Venezuelan writer Moisés Naím argues that modern autocrats, and would-be autocrats, base their efforts around three Ps: populism, polarisation and post-truth.

In Europe, the first P is having a good decade. Right-wing populist parties are in power in Hungary, Slovakia and Italy, and won last year’s Dutch election. It’s not one-way traffic: populist governments have lost power in Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic. But next month’s EU elections look likely to see a sharp increase in the far right’s representation in the European Parliament. 

Right-leaning Parliament

In January, the European Council on Foreign Relations, a Berlin-based think tank, predicted that “anti-European populists” would top the poll in nine EU member states, including Austria, Belgium and France, and come second or third in nine more, including Germany, Spain and Sweden. Add in expected gains for the European People’s Party, the main centre-right grouping, and the next Parliament looks set to be the first with a right-wing majority.

How this will affect policy is not clear—as might be expected of a bunch of nationalists, Europe’s populist parties struggle to agree among themselves. But one obvious temptation is to look across the Atlantic and shudder. Is the European Parliament set to become more like the US Congress which, viewed from the outside, seems to produce mainly legislative deadlock and performative lunacy?

It’s important to keep things in perspective. On the second P, data from the World Values Survey show the US is an extreme outlier among Western democracies in the size of its divides on economic and social issues. Even so, the next Parliament will probably be less friendly towards research and researchers in a number of ways. For example, during the budget negotiations for the two most recent EU R&D programmes, Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe, MEPs advocated looser purse strings, while national governments pushed in the other direction. 

Academic freedom

A more populist Parliament will shift the centre of gravity on plans for the next Framework Programme, set to begin in 2028. The step-change in R&D spending that many research advocates see as essential for the EU’s scientific competitiveness looks unlikely. It also reduces the chance of stronger protections for academic freedom at the EU level.

Besides the shape of policy, the other major danger from a more populist Parliament will be how Ps two and three interact and reinforce each other. 

Again, the US leads the way. In a preprint published in January, a team of US-based researchers looked at how science was used in several hundred thousand policy documents produced by the US federal government, Congressional committees and think tanks between 1995 and 2021. They found that, while the gross amount of science cited rose sixfold in this time, its distribution was strikingly uneven. 

Democrat-controlled bodies and left-leaning think tanks cited significantly more studies than their Republican and right-wing counterparts. What’s more, there was little overlap between the work cited on either side. On climate, for example, the left looked to studies of economic costs and policy responses, while the right cited studies of past ice ages and plants’ responses to carbon dioxide. 

The findings give bibliometric weight to the impression that political tribes increasingly inhabit separate knowledge worlds, defining themselves by their views of what counts as evidence, or even facts.

Punitive voting

Most MEPs work hard to make policy evidence-based and against misinformation. But voters’ tendency to use European elections to punish their national governments has also opened the door to less diligent and scrupulous types willing to dabble in anti-vax propaganda and climate-change denial, among others. (The radical right does not have a monopoly on conspiracy theories, as the pandemic and the war in Ukraine have shown, but it does have more electoral success.)  

Research, then, is both a target and, repurposed as a wedge issue, a tool of populism. Will this be its fate in the next Parliament? 

A lot depends on how much the EPP is willing to make common cause with the far right—as it did early this year to oppose the EU Nature Restoration Law—both to advance its own agenda and to try to stop voters switching to these parties. Given that trying to meet extremists halfway rarely ends well, that would be a bad idea. It would certainly bode ill for universities and researchers. 

John Whitfield is the opinion editor at Research Professional News

This article also appeared in Research Europe 

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Unconventional skills are needed to achieve research infrastructures’ potential, say Katharina Cramer and Nicholas Rüffin

Europe’s research infra-structures are unmatched in their diversity, density and interconnectedness. These facilities offer several tens of thousands of external scientists access to unique instruments and experimental resources. 

Research infrastructures are vital components in political strategising and public dialogue, serving as catalysts for societal welfare and economic progress through innovation and frontier research. But increased political attention and new objectives that come with the expansion of roles pose challenges.

First, mission-oriented funding increasingly nudges research infrastructures to prioritise topics high on the political agenda. Two recent examples are materials research for the circular economy, and structural biology for public health and the pharmaceutical industry. Second, the European Commission, the OECD and national funding bodies have called for strengthened support and service frameworks aimed at user communities, which are expected to leverage the innovation potential of costly research infrastructures and deliver socioeconomic impact. 

Lacking the experience of established users, these groups require assistance and support to use instruments efficiently. In response, infrastructures have brought in adjustments such as automation, remote access and mail-in services tailored to these communities’ needs.

Shift in mindset

Growing demands create new tasks for research infrastructures’ in-house scientists, technicians and scientific support staff. Added to this, research infrastructures are struggling to compete for staff with the skills demanded by the growth of experimental data and the emergence of AI. 

These dynamics require a cultural shift to support diverse career trajectories, fostering an environment that enables the innovations that politics and society demand. This creates a need for people with a unique blend of technical, scientific and organisational expertise. Such roles require formal education, such as PhDs. But just as important are skills acquired through learning on the job and intimate knowledge of machines, instruments and techniques. These individuals are knowledge brokers, adept at translating information between different realms, bridging the gap between technical and scientific domains, or between in-house staff and external users. 

The emergence of such roles brings a need to reconceptualise professional identities and challenge conventional notions of what it means to work at research infrastructures. Funding bodies and scientific associations, including the EU, are opening up to this discussion. Several years ago, both the German Leibniz Association and the Swedish Science Council recognised the need for addressing the evolving challenges within research infrastructures. One notable response came from the Karolinska Institute, a world-renowned medical university in Stockholm, which in 2023 created a new career path for research infrastructure specialists.

In 2021, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory launched the Career Accelerator for Research Infrastructure Scientists, a €13.6 million, six-year fellowship programme. Another initiative called RItrainPlus is offering training to build managerial expertise at research infrastructures. The initiative plans to run a European School for Management of Research Infrastructures. Similar programmes are emerging globally—in the US and Japan.

These recent developments underscore the increasingly blurred boundary between positions in research and those job profiles traditionally viewed as administrative. 

Staff at research infrastructures may need to take a leap of faith, trusting that their academic communities will not see these new roles as less prestigious than traditional research posts. 

Recognising contributions

Research infrastructures must acknowledge the importance of offering opportunities to researchers whose expertise and inclinations lie towards bridge-building rather than the traditional pathways that culminate in a professorship. This in turn ties in with a larger discussion on frameworks for tracking career progression, evaluation standards and the recognition of alternative metrics beyond citations, grants and authorship. Recognising contributions to specialist databases, community engagement or the development of software and code as markers of professional achievement will be crucial. 

Ultimately, the effectiveness of research infrastructures hinges upon embracing the multifaceted talents of professionals. Fostering a culture that values diverse expertise fortifies infrastructures, empowering them to meet today’s challenges head-on.

Katharina Cramer and Nicolas Rüffin are at the Center for Advanced Security, Strategic and Integration Studies, University of Bonn, Germany

This article also appeared in Research Europe

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Back page gossip from the 9 May issue of Research Europe

Grow to improve

The EU can build on its existing strengths in areas including science by further expanding its membership to new countries, according to the president of the European Council of EU national leaders. “Our union is an economic, scientific, innovative and cultural giant. With future enlargements and more sovereignty, it will become even more so,” Charles Michel said last month in a speech marking 20 years since the EU’s 2004 enlargement.

At that time, 10 countries joined the EU at once: Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia. Three more joined subsequently: Bulgaria and Romania in 2007, and Croatia in 2013.

“What motivated the EU [in 2004]? It was our moral obligation to answer the call of history,” Michel said, referring to the “fall of the Iron Curtain”, when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, putting several of its former countries on the path to EU membership.

But he added: “It was also in our strategic interest…The ‘big-bang enlargement’ has given us more global clout. [It] has given us much more weight and a stronger position in international fora.”

Further enlargement is “a geopolitical imperative”, Michel stressed. This is because “the optimism of 2004 now seems like a long time ago”, with the EU facing three major shocks: climate change and biodiversity; digitisation; and geopolitical change.

“For decades, we have taken peace, security and prosperity for granted, and all the while we became over-dependent—on energy from Russia, on critical raw materials from China, and even on defence from the USA. And we have allowed a dangerous gap to develop between our own competitiveness and that of our main rivals. So now we must make up for lost time,” he said.

Further expansion should come by 2030, he said, adding that there is “a lot of work to do” for both the EU as it stands today and those countries hoping to join. “For the EU, it means reforming our programmes and budgets, and our decision-making,” he elaborated.

Main achievements

On social media, EU research commissioner Iliana Ivanova sought to “delve into some of the main achievements in research, innovation [and] education”, affecting the countries that joined the bloc in 2004.

She said that year’s enlargement had “transformed the R&I panorama”, and that the countries have helped to shape relevant policies through the European Research Area standards-raising initiative.

The EU has “dedicated over €3.5 billion to the new member states” through its R&I programmes, she said, amounting to support for thousands of individual projects.

These projects have included those funded by the European Research Council, including one led by the Institute of Chemistry of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, called Andrea, which developed a novel diagnostic kit to reliably detect prostate cancer.

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The next MEPs need R&I—it’s time to ensure they know it

This time next month, voters will head to the polls to elect a new European Parliament. With the next MEPs due to play a significant role in the creation of the EU’s upcoming long-term spending plan—to kick in from 2028—researchers have a lot staked on the outcome.

This week, the presidents of 28 science academies around the EU issued a joint statement to candidates, underscoring the value of research and innovation to the bloc and stressing that this “should not be taken for granted”. While sector representatives jostling for attention ahead of a vote is par for the course, the choice of language from these R&I leaders ought to give politicians particular pause. 

As our opinion editor John Whitfield writes, it is likely the elections will see a sharp increase in the far right’s representation in Parliament—potentially making it much less friendly to research and researchers. And there is a real risk that—without urgent attention—Europe’s research capabilities will fall alarmingly out of step with the scale of the challenges the sector’s work is critical to addressing.

One major risk the academy leaders highlight is to academic freedom—something that’s often taken for granted. Current German MEP and chair of the Parliament’s culture and education committee, Sabine Verheyen, expresses her concern over the impact of a growing autocratic undercurrent on education and more broadly. It is worth remembering the situation that was averted last year by Poland’s elections, with the science minister in the then-incumbent government having pushed for reforms that would reportedly have replaced the national science funder with a system under ministerial control.

Parliament will also need to ensure that efforts to safeguard the EU’s security do not inadvertently harm its R&I ambitions. Member states took an encouraging step on this thorny issue this week by nearing agreement on a draft position that research security should “not go beyond what is necessary to mitigate the risks at stake”. But amid rising international tensions and the increasing direct relevance of research areas such as AI to security threats, this debate has many rounds to come.

As you would expect, investment features prominently in the academy presidents’ missive. While they do not explicitly call for a particular level of funding, they press for delivery on the long-standing ambition for the EU to invest 3 per cent of its GDP annually in R&D. 

Numerous research organisations have already called for major increases to R&I funding in the EU’s next Multiannual Financial Framework. But with member states showing no sign of backing away from their painful yearly tradition of pushing for cuts to annual EU R&I spending, the Parliament’s support will, regrettably, be needed just as much to defend what is already in place.

The next crop of MEPs will face international political instability, a mounting climate crisis, food insecurity and a pressing need for energy transition. A properly funded, resilient and free research sector is essential to any serious efforts to thrive in this future.

This article also appeared in Research Europe

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Back page gossip from the 25 April issue of Research Europe

Parliament powers up

The European Parliament has adopted a set of reforms intended to make it “more modern and efficient”, which will come into effect when it holds its first plenary session after the June elections that will refresh its lineup of MEPs.

Among the reforms, it has given its leaders powers to set up temporary committees to deal with issues that would otherwise involve many existing committees. The current process for dealing with such issues is considered to “make the legislative process very difficult to handle”.

The Parliament also now considers itself able to demand “special scrutiny hearings to question commissioners on an issue of major political importance”, and it will be able to set up ad hoc plenary sessions.

“These reforms will make this house more efficient and more effective,” said president Roberta Metsola.

Envoy steps down

A reminder that the European Parliament already has powers beyond its formal role in shaping EU laws came this month with the decision of MEP Markus Pieper not to take up a new role as envoy for small and medium-sized enterprises in the European Commission.

Pieper resigned from the SME post a day before his scheduled start on 16 April, saying he could “see no possibility of fulfilling the legitimate expectations associated with the office”.

He had been due to report to Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, with whom he shares political party membership, and internal market commissioner Thierry Breton. That apparent chumminess with von der Leyen caused concern after the European Morning newsletter reported that two other candidates for the post scored higher at one stage of the application process.

On social media, Pieper blamed Breton for the outcome, saying the commissioner’s questioning of the selection process (along with several other commissioners) was “motivated solely by party politics”. In contrast, Breton said he wanted to ensure that the principles of “transparency and collegiality” were respected.

But it may well have been Pieper’s own colleagues in the Parliament who caused the pressure to become too much to bear. The concerns had already been discussed at the Commission without much apparent impact, but the situation came to a head after a Parliament vote on the issue.

Several days after the Commission discussions, MEPs voted by 382 to 144, with 80 abstentions, to express concern about the situation and ask the Commission to select a new candidate using a “truly transparent and open process”. Less than a week later, Pieper resigned.

The Commission’s chief spokesperson defended the appointment, saying that Pieper was “a proven expert on SMEs [who] prevailed in a multi-stage selection process”. He pushed back against the Parliament, saying that “the autonomy of each EU institution in appointing its senior officials must be respected”.

But by that point Breton and the Parliament had already got their way, whoever was truly responsible. A replacement for Pieper is now not expected until after the June elections.

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Industrial policy has become a hot topic for the EU’s political big beasts

Ahead of June’s European elections, the EU’s political big hitters are setting out their views on priorities for the coming five years—in some cases perhaps with an eye on claiming a major role for themselves after the vote.

Current European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen is seeking a second term, but national leaders, who will nominate someone for that role and choose their own European Council president, will be considering whose views on key issues align with their own.

One issue attracting much attention is how the EU can boost its industrial and technological competitiveness so as not to fall further behind a digitally dominant US and an industrially mighty China.

EU leaders have asked two former prime ministers of Italy to produce reports on this issue. Enrico Letta published his on the future of the EU single market on 17 April, calling for a “fifth freedom” for research, while Mario Draghi is due to publish his report on EU competitiveness in June.

Pre-empting their advice, three Commission leaders have been setting out their own views. 

Speaking in the US this month, Margrethe Vestager, executive vice-president with responsibility for digitisation and competition policy, called on the EU and “like-minded partners” to develop “a list of trustworthiness criteria for critical clean technologies”. Such a list, she implied, would stimulate innovation while avoiding what the EU sees as unfair industrial subsidies. 

Also this month, internal market commissioner Thierry Breton took to the social networking site LinkedIn to argue that the EU needs to invest “more strategically”, focusing on “areas where technological leadership is at stake”. And at the Commission’s Research and Innovation Days conference last month, economy commissioner Paolo Gentiloni called for new EU funding instruments to address underinvestment in R&I.

Meanwhile, seeking to shape post-election policy, a group of independent experts including Robert-Jan Smits, the Commission’s former top R&I official, published a report this month calling for a boost to EU investment in technology-based companies.

Smits and his co-authors claim that there is the potential for an additional €1 trillion of public and private investment in European technology companies over the next five years in fields such as computing, healthcare and energy.

EU leaders clearly feel the bloc’s economic future hangs in the balance, and the knowledge sector is crucial to whether it rises or falls. 

The policy decisions that follow will affect research in myriad ways, not least through the design of the EU’s next R&I funding programme. Many feel that the European Innovation Council, created under the current Horizon Europe programme, has done too little to boost the EU’s high-tech industries.

For their part, academic groups are focused on persuading the EU to spend more on fundamental research, which has seemed to lag innovation in terms of funding and policy attention.

Additional support for innovation seems inevitable, but its form and impact on basic research will be vital issues for the sector going into the elections and beyond.  

This article also appeared in Research Europe

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Campaign to strengthen status of supporting roles will ensure research excellence, says Dipti Pandya

I was recently at an event in Ireland where a person from a research funder was keen to point out that research management is not a profession in the same way as accountancy or law.

Such attitudes are understandable, if outdated. Many research managers and administrators remain employed on a per-project basis and are viewed as an overhead.

Some don’t even realise that they are research managers or administrators. In a recent consultation of European research managers, self-recognition emerged as a vital condition for wider recognition of the role’s increasingly indispensable place in the research and innovation ecosystem.

This explains why one of the major trends in research administration, running across successive conferences of the European Association of Research Managers and Administrators (Earma, which I chair), is the effort to define what these roles are and to win recognition for them among research-performing organisations, funders and policymakers.

Whatever definition we end up with, it should be drawn as widely as possible. Fundamentally, research management is a bridging role, mediating between researchers, funders, regulators, policymakers and businesses.

There are lots of places to stand on this bridge, from traditionally administrative leadership roles to those more closely entwined with R&I. Indeed, some of the lack of definition stems from this healthy breadth and diversity of responsibilities. But all of us are engaged in enabling R&I and this is at the core of our values and our strengths.

Networks and roadmaps

Earma has been speaking more and more of research management as a profession, learning from international counterparts. Global meetings such as the congress of the International Network of Research Management Societies are hugely beneficial forums, especially as research management becomes more international in terms of career mobility and cooperation. In May 2025, in Madrid, Earma will host the Inorms congress for the first time.

Recognition, and the campaign to get it, has formal elements. Spain, for example, recently recognised the role of research managers, or “personal de gestión”, in legislation.

One formal initiative is the RM Roadmap being coordinated by Earma with contributions from 35 countries. For the first time, we are beginning to understand both the breadth and the common experiences of the research management community in Europe.

At the European level, Action 17 of the European Research Area policy agenda, which focuses on the value of what it calls “R&I managers”, has given our quest for recognition a new layer of legitimacy. The European Commission is supporting efforts around professional development and recognition, building career pathways, upskilling and providing networking opportunities for research managers.

Other institutions should follow the Commission’s lead. At the first session to co-create the RM Roadmap, one piece of feedback was that “there is a need for support from government bodies and funding agencies to establish and sustain research management networks and associations”.

Bigger and better

Recognition is also part of bottom-up community engagement, with professional networking at its core. Opportunities, space and time for building networks and informal relationships are crucial, just as they are for our academic colleagues.

Many research managers and administrators work in isolation; Earma’s annual conference gives them a chance to see that they are part of a wider community and a profession. We are expecting over 1,400 delegates at this year’s conference in Odense, Denmark, compared with the 1,100 who attended in Oslo in 2022.

The conference will see the launch of Earma’s strategy for 2024-28. In this, the association will emphasise cultivating a future-proofed and thriving community that prioritises professional development and recognition. Successfully delivering that strategy will depend on the engagement of our ambitious and driven community.

Projects such as the RM Roadmap are helping Earma mature as an organisation. They are also providing the data needed to support the development of formal research management associations and networks across Europe.

We will use our position, including our new headquarters in Brussels, to ensure that all relevant EU legislation has the input from researchers and research managers needed to ensure successful implementation. These priorities will be reflected in a position paper we will launch at the conference setting out 10 recommendations for the next EU R&I framework programme.

Stakeholders in governments, funders and elsewhere, as well as our own community, must recognise that excellent research is achieved only through excellent research management. For that to happen, research managers first need to recognise and own our own success.

Research Professional News is media partner for the Earma 2024 conference, held from 23 to 25 April in Odense, Denmark.

Dipti Pandya is head of pre-award funding at University College Dublin and chair of Earma.

A version of this article also appeared in Research Europe

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Handled carefully, large language models can transform research support, say Maéva Vignes and Lionel Jouvet

When you work in research management, you never know which of your skills and experiences are going to come in handy. As researchers, we both had a close-up view of the avalanche of data coming out of the sciences and quickly realised we needed to be data scientists as well as disciplinary experts.

One of us, Maéva, has a background in nanotechnology and in the design of educational board games. After joining the research support team at the University of Southern Denmark’s Research Innovation Organisation (SDU RIO) in 2017, she incorporated data science into her work. In 2020 she led the development of web apps using natural language processing to help researchers search for funding opportunities.

For his part, Lionel began his career as a marine biologist and helped to set up a makerspace in Odense, teaching everything from sewing and woodwork to computer-aided design and 3D printing. In late 2021 that role led him, via a fellow maker, to the GPT sandbox, an early chatbot powered by a large language model with impressive capacities in writing and describing computer code.

Lionel joined the data group at SDU RIO in mid-2022. Together, we quickly realised the great assets and potential risks of generative AI technologies in research support and coding. We were determined to stay ahead of the curve.

Magical but fallible

On 28 November 2022, OpenAI released the public version of ChatGPT. As people experimented with the bot over the Christmas holidays, two main impressions emerged: one, it was a remarkable tool capable of writing on any subject; and two, it often gave incorrect information.

This combination of magic and fallibility sparked a flurry of conversations among colleagues about the capacities, limitation and potential of LLMs and chatbots. Over the next few months, interest in generative AI for producing images also surged. Colleagues began achieving impressive results, and the buzz around LLMs grew louder within the academic community.

In June 2023, the growing curiosity and concerns spurred us to host a workshop, bringing together departments including administration, research support, legal and ethics. This became a weekly learning circle for testing tools such as Microsoft Copilot, OpenAI GPT, DALL.E, swapping ideas, sharing reservations, discussing tips and keeping abreast of the latest technology. In the past eight months, attendance has risen from seven to more than 40, and other departments have been inspired to start similar activities.

We organised ourselves to be flexible and reactive, building a network that covers ethical, legal, teaching, technical and user-related matters. Collaboration and knowledge flow, both vertical and horizontal, have been crucial to harnessing LLMs and navigating the mix of excitement, worry and scepticism within the university.

Everyday reality

Now LLMs are an integral part of our daily work. They have changed the way we approach tasks such as coding, summarising documents, brainstorming, workshop and presentation design, and application drafting. We have, for example, used these technologies to help researchers find European Research Council panel best suited to their application.

At the same time, we recognise that generative AI remains a wild west. Platforms come, go and change rapidly. Many cloud-based technologies are located outside the EU and its data protection rules. Concerns about intellectual property, bias and the ethical liberties taken in the training of LLMs shape our decision-making.

To address these issues, we prioritise data security and ethical considerations. We try to deploy models on the premises using either laptops or the university’s high-performance computing environment. And we focus on European platforms such as Mistral and open-source projects. By tailoring the technology to our needs and maintaining independence, openness and flexibility, we strive to avoid lock-in to specific platforms and align how we use LLMs with our values and regulatory requirements.

The rapid pace of LLM development has implications for the future of research management, including job security. As the wave gathers force, continued exploration and collaboration are crucial, as the recent AI Days organised by the European Association of Research Managers and Administrators have shown. Academic actors must play a proactive and leading role in defining and pioneering how AI is used in research and research management.

We would welcome readers and attendees at the Earma conference to share their experiences, concerns and ideas about LLMs. By working together, we can harness the potential of LLMs and build a future where AI serves as a powerful tool for innovation and progress across research.

Research Professional News is media partner for the Earma 2024 conference, held this week in Odense, Denmark.

Maéva Vignes founded and heads the data group in the research support team at the University of Southern Denmark’s Research Innovation Organisation. Lionel Jouvet is a member of the data group and an expert in the implementation of AI tools.

A version of this article also appeared in Research Europe

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Commission’s R&D flagship was justifiably celebratory—now comes the hard part, says Daniel Spichtinger

This year’s European Research and Innovation Days conference was the first to allow in-person attendance since before the pandemic. That alone was enough to create a feel-good mood. But beyond this, the European Commission has always made the annual event an exercise in accentuating the positives.

This iteration was framed as a celebration of 40 years of R&I within the EU, harking back to the launch of the first R&I framework programme in 1984. The achievements since then were showcased: 1.8 million proposals received, 126,000 grants signed and 700,000 participants involved. 

When worries did surface—of being outpaced in emerging technologies, of precarious research careers and lagging nations, of failing to give research a budget to match the expectations placed on it—they were presented as opportunities.

The Commission also used the event to unveil the 2025-27 strategic plan for Horizon Europe, the current R&I framework programme. The plan focuses on the green and digital transitions and creating “a more resilient, competitive, inclusive and democratic Europe”. Another significant release was guidance for the responsible use of artificial intelligence, including a recommendation against using generative AI in “sensitive activities” such as peer review. 

These were largely positively received, with the League of European Research Universities—never shy to criticise EU policy—praising the EU’s flexible approach and commitment to academic self-governance in its draft document on research security.

There is a lot to feel good about. Horizon Europe really is a “game changer” worldwide, to quote Simon Draper, New Zealand’s ambassador to the EU, who described the country’s recent association deal as its biggest science policy event in a generation. Statistics show that associated countries have above-average success rates in the framework programmes. 

The presence of the Commission’s executive vice-president Margrethe Vestager and economy commissioner Paolo Gentiloni, alongside more usual suspects such as research commissioner Iliana Ivanova and staff from the research directorate, also showed the EU’s ambitions for R&I and the significance of research in wider policy thinking. 

Budget talk

This ambition was clear in discussions on the budget, with evidence from the recently completed evaluation of Horizon 2020, the R&I framework programme for 2014-20, given as a compelling rationale for more research funding. Every euro invested in Horizon 2020 generated five in benefits, but the evaluation also showed that many high-quality proposals went unfunded due to lack of resources. 

The same will surely be true for Horizon Europe, highlighting the need for an increased budget in Framework Programme 10, due to begin in 2028. Organisations advocating for research have suggested €200 billion—but with Horizon Europe’s budget already under pressure, achieving this solely through the traditional source of member states’ contributions looks nigh on impossible. 

In this context, one of the most interesting suggestions came from Gentiloni, who floated the idea of a Next Generation EU-type instrument for investment in research, based on the €800bn supplied to aid recovery from the pandemic. This is a bold proposal, but some voices in frugal (or should that be stingy) member states are probably loath to see the Next Generation EU experience repeated, mostly due to ideological concerns about creating what’s been called a ‘Schuldenunion’, or debt union.

Building support

When realising policy ambitions depends on the decisions and priorities of member states, it helps to remember the political realities outside the hall—particularly as most sessions were panel discussions, with audience participation limited to questions submitted online. The explicit support voiced from Belgium, which currently holds the presidency of the Council of the EU member states, is a good start but is not enough. 

One way to build support for EU R&I funding is to improve research across the continent. In this context, it was good to see the RI Days giving countries such as Bulgaria and Romania, the focus of EU efforts to widen participation in research, a platform to highlight their use of diverse funding sources and reforms to their national R&I ecosystems.  

As we start the long and winding road towards Framework Programme 10, securing widespread support from member states’ top decision-makers will be vital to realising the full potential of EU-funded research. For this, those who advocate for research will need to make themselves heard not just in Brussels but also with less friendly audiences in finance ministries across Europe. 

Daniel Spichtinger is an independent EU research policy specialist and former member of the European Commission’s open science unit

This article also appeared in Research Europe

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