EUROPE: Researchers told: be less nationalistic

Research in European Union countries is too national in focus to be fully effective, says the European Commission. The commission says this poses a major obstacle to the ambitious Lisbon strategy for giving the EU a global lead in technology by 2010.

The commission claims that some 85% of public sector research in Europe is programmed, financed, monitored and evaluated at national level and only 15% of public civil R&D is financed on a cross-border collaborative basis. This means a significant proportion of the EU's research effort is compromised by "fragmentation and duplication of research efforts".

Brussels has already called for a greater pooling of effort in general terms. Now it wants to make national and regional research more coherent through joint priority setting. But this approach is not wildly popular in all 27 EU member states.

Some countries attach great importance to their own research efforts and are unwilling to see them diluted in an EU 'mix'. Others argue that competing efforts within the EU are more likely to produce innovative breakthroughs than cooperation.

But EU Research Commissioner Janez Potočnik is undeterred. Presenting an initiative on joint programming last month, he listed fighting climate change, securing energy supply, preventing major pandemics for diseases, preserving marine ecosystems and biodiversity, ensuring food quality and securing food supply as "the most shared challenges of our societies".

These were major societal challenges that called for a European, if not a global, response and "national level action is a waste of time, money and resources", Potočnik said. The challenges could be met through technology and the commission wanted to promote cross-border research by setting common research agendas.

Joint programming did not mean that all member states had to be involved: "It can be à la carte," he said, and should be open to any member state or associated country to join whenever they wanted.

Potočnik said joint programming "has the potential to become a mechanism at least as important as the Framework Programmes in the European research landscape and change the very way in which Europeans think about research".

National programming of research had a place when it addressed national needs and priorities but many of today's major problems went far beyond that. Joint programming was about public cooperation in strategic research areas where member states voluntarily decided to bring money and people together.

"It will also be up to the committed partners to identify common objectives and develop and implement the research agenda," he said.

alan.osborn@uw-news.com