EUROPE: 'COST' group to speed reforms

Top European scientific research officials have agreed on measures to improve the effectiveness of the EU's Lisbon strategy - a slew of policies designed to make the EU a global leader in technology and innovation by 2010. Meeting in Belgrade last month, senior officials of the COST organisation, or European Cooperation in the field of Scientific and Technical Research, agreed on the need to "improve flexibility and speed up rapid response capacity to enhance the impact of the Lisbon strategy."

COST, established in 1971, is an inter-governmental system encouraging cooperation and networking among European researchers which it achieves by helping finance networking activities such as meetings, conferences, short-term scientific exchanges and outreach activities. It creates research project priorities (called actions) on the basis of suggestions received from universities and research centres, encouraging research groups to work together to advance these subjects. It does not directly fund research itself, although it encourages non-European researchers to participate in its projects.

A committee of senior officials has determined that more emphasis will be put on strategic scientific initiatives in future, leading to more projects focusing on cutting edge science identified as potentially important for promoting economic growth. These include interdisciplinary initiatives that could pull in specialists from a wide range of disciplines, able to develop new technologies in ways not previously considered.

Such projects "could be potential breeders of new scientific communities around multidisciplinary topics, which could also spin off proposals for new COST actions," said a committee report. COST encourages the development of joint projects by researchers from differing backgrounds and disciplines in a variety of ways such as strategic workshops and science days. It is working with the European Science Foundation to help it generate funding for its projects from the EU's Seventh Framework Programme for research.

The COST meeting in Belgrade authorised 25 new research project topics for which it will welcome additional participants that already have funding support from research teams. These included investigating new drugs for neglected diseases, translating genomic and epigenetic studies of myelodysplastic syndromes and acute myeloid leukaemia, protozoan parasites and histocompatibility, and investigating fish larval production in European aquaculture.

Meanwhile, the COST secretariat operates a continuous open call for proposals with periodic collection dates for new proposals it may decide are worth promoting as actions in the future. The next deadline is 26 September 2008.

The organisation invites proposals for new actions "contributing to the scientific, economic, cultural or societal development of Europe". A key feature of COST is its openness to the rest of the world on the basis of mutual benefit - more than 190 institutions from 28 non-COST countries participate and the organisation itself has 34 European countries as members plus Israel. COST's coordinating activities are financed by the European Commission.

www.cost.esf.org

alan.osborn@uw-news.com