International cooperation and solidarity can give postwar reconstruction sound foundations, says Oksana Seumenicht

Earlier this month, more tragic news arrived from Kyiv: DNA tests confirmed that Bizhan Sharopov, a PhD neurobiologist at the Bogomoletz Intstitute of Physiology in Kyiv, had been killed. He is one of many researchers to die in the Russian Federation’s war against Ukraine. 

As the war rages into a second year, Russian rockets continue to destroy critical infrastructure. More than 2,500 educational institutions have been damaged and 437 razed to the ground, according to Ukraine’s Ministry of Education and Science. 

An online poll last October found that more than two-thirds of European researchers support sanctions on scientific relations with Russia. On the invasion’s first anniversary—and in the ninth year of Russian aggression—Ukrainian researchers are calling on the academic community to reassess the role of Russian science in supporting the war. 

This is not just an emotional stance. Freedom of speech, research, teaching and learning are severely compromised in Russia. The country ranks in the bottom 20-30 per cent of the Academic Freedom Index compiled by Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen, Germany, and the V-Dem institute. Cooperation with Russian institutions could pose a security threat and would violate academic values and freedoms. 

Ukrainian researchers and educators remain incredibly resilient and are convinced that science and research will be key to rebuilding their country after the war. International cooperation and solidarity in research and higher education are crucial to giving post-war reconstruction sound foundations to build upon. 

Access to education

One priority is to give Ukraine’s students education now, so that they can become the next generation of researchers. Encouraging examples range from the University of Würzburg’s bachelor programme for displaced mathematics students, taught in Ukrainian, to the partnership between the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and the Kyiv School of Economics. 

The German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) is in its second round of support for German-Ukrainian university partnerships. And the Ukraine Global Faculty, coordinated by the Ukrainian non-profit organisation K.FUND and supported by the country’s government, aims to provide Ukrainian students and professionals with online lectures.

Ukraine’s current generation of researchers also needs support and training. At the EU-level and nationally, there is a range of programmes aimed at displaced Ukrainian researchers. 

Preventing a brain drain means thinking now about how to help people return home once conditions are safe. The EU-funded MSCA4Ukraine fellowship programme aims to address this via secondments. Dedicated fellowships to support return and reintegration, similar to those offered by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation to fellows from certain countries, could be another useful option. 

Many researchers remain in Ukraine, creating an urgent need for non-residential support schemes, such as those offered by the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna or the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies. Distance-learning programmes, such as the Executive Leadership Academy for Ukrainian University Leaders offered by the University of California, Berkeley, can fill the gap when no research is possible. 

Ukraine’s research and innovation ecosystem must also be strengthened. This could be done through long-term grants, such as those offered by Scientists and Engineers in Exile or Displaced, a programme run by the US National Academy of Sciences in collaboration with the Polish Academy of Sciences. The national research foundations of Ukraine and Switzerland have also agreed a joint funding call. 

Another inspiring initiative is the plan to establish an International Centre for Mathematics in Ukraine, spearheaded by four Fields Medal winners, including Ukraine-born Vladimir Drinfeld and Maryna Viazovska. Creating focused centres of excellence in cooperation with international partners, rather than trying to rebuild destroyed universities, could help Ukraine find its niche in the world of global science. 

A dedicated network group recently initiated by the Council of Young Scientists at Ukraine’s Ministry of Education and Science aims to build ties between Ukrainian scientists at home and abroad. Part of this will be a Ukrainian Science Diaspora online platform, under development in collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology.

A commitment to research integrity and academic freedom means continued support for Ukraine. Its science and innovation base must not just survive; it must become an integral part of global research, and serve as a motor for rebuilding Ukraine as an equal member of the European family. 

Oksana Seumenicht is programme director of MSCA4Ukraine at the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Berlin and co-founder of the German-Ukrainian Academic Society and the Ukrainian Academic International Network. She writes in a personal capacity.

This article also appeared in Research Europe

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Policies to counter nepotism influence evaluation processes and attitudes to reform, says John Whitfield

Last November, two Spanish science-policy researchers, Ismael Rafols and Jordi Molas-Gallart, drew attention to the fact that in Spain, university hiring and promotion decisions are signed off by government agencies at national or regional level. 

This system, they wrote, was “introduced in the 2000s to reduce nepotism” but has resulted in the agencies taking a “rigid and standardised” approach based on journal rankings. Universities, they argued, need more autonomy.   

Theirs is one of many such calls in Europe for researcher careers to be de-linked from sometimes crude metrics. 

At present, the likeliest vehicle for such reform is the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment. Coara’s agreement calls on signatories to “move away from inappropriate uses of metrics”, to “broaden recognition of the diverse practices, activities and careers in research”, and to allow for differences between disciplines, cultures and places. 

Since it was finalised last year, it has attracted signatures from organisations across Europe. But differences in how nations and institutions approach evaluation are not just an internal issue for research. They depend on society and history more broadly—particularly social norms and the rule of law. 

The historical rationale for Spain’s approach makes it all the more interesting that while Spain’s CSIC network of publicly funded laboratories and many universities have signed Coara, its main public funder, the State Research Agency (AEI), has not. 

Sources point to differences in opinion at different levels of the Spanish system, with the appetite for change declining the closer one gets to government.

Seeking clarity

A diversity of views across different bodies might lead to some welcome flexibility, but it might also create inconsistencies that could leave researchers unclear what is required of them. 

Asked why it had not signed Coara, the AEI pointed out that it has signed the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, which has similar goals to Coara, and that it no longer uses metrics such as journal impact factors or h-index to evaluate individuals. 

“The AEI is firmly committed to fighting against the undesired effects of the publish or perish philosophy,” it said. “However, as the country’s main funding agency, it sees a certain risk in committing to follow procedures that may be too distant from our reality in Spain and making commitments that could be detrimental to our science.”

So far, national funders in 15 EU member states, along with the UK, Switzerland and Norway, have signed Coara. One holdout is Italy, where policymakers have also sought to combat nepotism in academic appointments. The country has given metrics a relatively prominent role in its national evaluation and in the habilitation process needed to become a university professor. Its national funder, the Ministry of Universities and Research, did not respond to a request for comment. 

Policymakers’ engagement with research evaluation partly reflects the strength of a nations’ research system. Unsurprisingly, the EU national funders that have signed Coara are mostly from the member states with the highest R&D spending as a proportion of GDP. 

But there’s also a strikingly good match with a country’s position on the Corruption Perceptions Index published by Transparency International at the end of January. Most countries where national funders have signed Coara score well on the index. Only two such countries—Slovenia and the Czech Republic—have worse scores than the highest-ranked non-signatory, which is Spain.

Otherwise, nations without national funder signatories are arranged squarely below those with them in this proxy for corruption. This is not to point to some funders as suspect and others as exemplars. Italy’s network of public research institutes, the CNR, and its research-evaluation agency Anvur, have both signed Coara. 

The AEI’s stance shows that not signing does not show a lack of reflection or engagement, and Coara does not have a monopoly on the issue. But it does hint at potential complications that may loom larger, particularly if Coara becomes more global.

Qualitative judgment

The coalition wants assessment to be based “primarily on qualitative judgment”. But, as others have observed, in places where the qualities needed to get ahead in academia don’t necessarily include being good at research, researchers tend to be more pro-metrics, seeing measurements as preferable to nepotism and patronage.

Coara will need to be alive to such issues. It will also need to deal with policymakers who might be reluctant to let go of the reins of evaluation. 

John Whitfield is opinion editor at Research Europe

This article also appeared in Research Europe

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Rebuilding Ukraine’s research sector can spark a brighter future

One year ago, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine appalled the world, and left Ukraine’s people facing a devastating new reality. Since then, thousands of researchers have fled the country, many continuing their work elsewhere. Others have stayed, working or defending their institutions and country.

On P8 of this issue, four Ukrainian researchers recount their experiences of the past 12 months. Their stories—from the chemist living day and night in his lab to guard it from attack, to the professor who fled the country with her nine-year-old daughter—speak of terror, courage and a passion for their work and their country. They also express hope in a future where Ukrainian research is rebuilt as a bigger part of an international research effort, underpinned by a renewed commitment to academic freedom.

Ukraine’s researchers have expressed deep gratitude for the international support they have received since Russia’s invasion. At EU, country and institutional levels, there have been numerous schemes to resettle researchers and enable them to continue their work, while those who stayed have been helped with grants, equipment and resources. Sergey Kolotilov, a chemist from Kyiv, says: “I don’t know of anybody who looked for a position abroad and could not find one in a short period of time.” 

In a world where bureaucracy and money are often shameful obstacles to humanitarian action, the speed and thoroughness of the response could not be taken for granted, even given the widespread condemnation of Russia.

Now Ukraine’s researchers are uniting in a renewed plea to the international research community: to help their country rebuild its research base as a cornerstone of a rebuilt Ukraine. As many Ukrainians look for EU membership, researchers hope their world can be reshaped with European values, and be a bigger contributor to the international research endeavour.

A path to this future is already being paved through relationships brought about or renewed by war. With Ukrainian researchers continuing their work in institutions across Europe, connections are being forged which can outlast the conflict, however long it may continue. 

On a more strategic level, too, there is a growing shift in focus. On P11, Oksana Seumenicht, co-founder of the German-Ukrainian society Ukrainet, details efforts already under way to prevent long-term brain drain: EU-funded fellowships; distance learning programmes; and a recently issued joint funding call from the national research foundations of Ukraine and Switzerland.

These steps are hugely welcome, but rebuilding Ukraine’s research base—especially as envisaged by those who are part of it—will require many more. Fellowships will be needed to support return, and as Seumenicht outlines, plans to create centres of excellence in cooperation with international partners could offer a model to “help Ukraine find its niche in the world of global science”. 

The initial support for Ukrainian researchers was, by necessity, delivered in haste. As the EU starts planning for its next R&D framework programme, its officials must grasp the chance to take a long-term view of the assistance Ukraine may need. Doing so will benefit not only the country and its researchers, but also European research as a whole. 

This article also appeared in Research Europe

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Back page gossip from the 23 February issue of Research Europe

It’s a date

Kudos to all the research organisations that took advantage of Valentine’s Day to crowbar a plug for their activities into the special occasion/commercial schmaltzfest (delete as preferred). Honourable mention goes to the European Commission’s Twitter account for the EU’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme, which appropriately used the date to advertise its online tool for finding partners for potential projects.

Somewhat less convincing to your correspondent was the European Research Council’s adoption of the day’s social media hashtags to proclaim: “Just like love, research is full of wonder and discovery.”

Maybe it is at first, but then surely comes the inevitable overfamiliarity, annoyance at minor irritations and roving eye for better opportunities elsewhere? No? Please nobody tell our wonderful partners…

Keeping a distance

Going in the opposite direction to love and companionship, leaders of the European Parliament endorsed a plan to strengthen their institution’s integrity in the wake of the Qatargate influence scandal.

This included introducing “a cooling-off period for MEPs who wish to lobby Parliament when they are no longer in office” and a “ban on friendship groups with third countries where official parliamentary interlocutors already exist”.

Valentines be warned: nothing good comes from getting too cosy with the wrong crowd. 

What not to do

Using “buzzwords” and being “too ambitious” in aiming for project outcomes are common mistakes made when applying for funding from the EU’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme, one of its administrative agencies has revealed.

Other common problems include forgetting to include ethical considerations, paraphrasing the Horizon Europe work programme when setting out expected pathways to impact, and confusing the meanings of results, output and impact, the European Research Executive Agency said in a list of dos and don’ts for applicants it published this month.

It said it hoped the list would help applicants prepare good-quality proposals: “Don’t use buzzwords. Try to explain your project in realistic terms. Don’t oversell your idea with too many or too ambitious outcomes. Don’t ‘overwrite’ your proposal—try to remain simple and straightforward.” 

Another recommendation was to demonstrate how a project consortium is suited to its task by setting out “the relevant capacities of the organisations and individuals” and adopting a “risk-mitigation approach”. The agency acknowledged that winning money from Horizon Europe is not easy. “Submitting a project proposal under Horizon Europe…requires careful planning, precise budgeting and a seamless collaboration with partners,” it said.

For more tips on winning funding from grantees and funders, remember we have a publication called Funding Insight devoted to exactly that.

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Evaluation reforms shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, say Lutz Bornmann and colleagues

There is a concerted campaign in many areas of science policy against the inappropriate use of bibliometrics in research evaluation. One stated goal of the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment is to “reduce the dominance of a narrow set of overly quantitative journal and publication-based metrics”. 

In Germany, the German Science and Humanities Council (WR) and the German Research Foundation (DFG) have opposed the quantitative evaluation of research. The WR has said it favours “assessing the quality of individual publications…rather than focusing on the publication venue, or indicators derived from it”. While the DFG has warned that “a narrow focus in the system of attributing academic reputation—for example, based on bibliometric indicators—not only has a detrimental effect on publication behaviour, it also fails to do justice to scholarship in all its diversity”.

Goal displacement

The principal concern behind these reform efforts is that using bibliometrics to measure research quality leads to goal displacement: scoring high becomes the end, damaging research in the process. And it is true that improper use of bibliometric data—such as tying funding or salaries to measures of productivity or citation impact—can have undesirable effects on scholarship. 

In the evaluation of economic research, for example, there is a focus on just five renowned journals. Consequently, they are overwhelmed with submissions, the risk of scientific misconduct in the pursuit of spectacular results rises, and much other high-quality research that is not published in these five gets overlooked.

But the research assessment baby should not be thrown out with the bibliometric bathwater. It is important to distinguish between amateur and professional biblio-metrics, but neither the WR nor the DFG does so. 

By amateur bibliometrics, we mean decision-makers whose lack of expertise in the field puts them at risk of using unsuitable indicators and databases and inadequate datasets, resulting in harmful incentives and misguided decisions. Professional biblio-metrics makes use of large datasets from appropriate sources, and professionally recognised methods.

Bibliometrics is unsuitable for some purposes, such as evaluating junior scientists for doctoral positions. But for others, such as surveying the academic activities of institutions or countries and the cooperation between them, it can yield empirical results of the highest validity. If bibliometrics is to be used in an evaluation, specialists in bibliometrics and experts in the relevant fields should collaborate to decide whether the use is sensible and, if so, how bibliometrics should be applied.

Popularity factor

To tackle the inappropriate use of metrics in research evaluation, the reasons that make them popular should first and foremost be addressed. One is speed: evaluating academic work using metrics can be quicker than examining its content, and several studies have shown that bibliometrics and peer review achieve similar results in many cases. Using bibliometrics as a heuristic saves overstretched academics valuable time.

Another reason metrics are popular is the desire to reduce subjectivity in evaluation. As a rule, reviewers of the same work reach different judgments; metrics offer the (claimed) possibility of objectivity. It is much easier to base an argument on a metric than on the content of a work, which could be open to dispute. However, the use of metrics in decision-making may also cause researchers to relinquish some of their own judgments.

Addressing these concerns means reforming peer review processes. Scholars should be given enough time to carry out peer review, and reviewers should be chosen on the basis of expertise, not eminence. Highly regarded scholars are overwhelmed with requests to review papers, grant proposals, job applications and so on, often outside their own fields. Focusing on reputation can result in eminent but unqualified reviewers. In such a situation, bibliometric indicators become more appealing. To avoid their use, only those competent to conduct qualitative peer review should be given the job of evaluating the research, irrespective of their reputation.

Just as the use of bibliometrics in research evaluation can be criticised, so can qualitative, content-focused peer review—in terms of reliability and fairness, for example. Both modes of evaluation have their own pros and cons. Rather than reject one or the other, a specific procedure should be developed for each planned research evaluation to allow for the optimal assessment of that research. 

The views of the authors do not necessarily match those of the Max Planck Society

Lutz Bornmann and Georg Botz work at the administrative headquarters of the Max Planck Society in Munich, Germany, and Robin Haunschild is at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart, Germany

This article also appeared in Research Europe

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Making doctoral training more professional and selective would benefit all Europe, says Jürgen Janger

Precarity of research careers touches on questions of systemic efficiency and equity. But while this is widely acknowledged, a coherent, evidence-based picture of the problem and measures to address it have been lacking.

In a European Commission-funded report, my colleagues and I try to fill this void, analysing data from sources including surveys, Eurostat and online job offers, as well as interviews and a workshop with policymakers. 

Precarity means different things in different places. In the EU’s research-intensive nations, it means many junior researchers on fixed-term contracts competing for open-ended contracts. In its emerging R&D nations, the main issues are poor salaries and funding.

There are positive trends: the share of fixed-term contracts is falling, and recruitment is be-coming more transparent and merit-based. But our data still reveal high levels of precarity. 

In 2019, 40 per cent of all researchers in the EU were on fixed-term contracts, compared with just 8 per cent of R&D workers in industry. For under-35s in research-intensive nations, this rises to 86 per cent. In the emerging countries, 28 per cent of PhD trainees lacked formal employment contracts.

Policies aimed at reducing precarity need to consider supply and demand, researchers’ working conditions and how these interact. Recruiting more early career researchers without more funding for permanent positions, for example, would only make things worse.

In particular, reforming the structure and processes of PhD training is vital. PhD candidates should be seen as professional researchers, not indentured apprentices. They need formal contracts and pay, just as their peers in industry would get.

Structured support

Many countries have no or few graduate schools, structured doctoral programmes or other support structures. Such schools can provide a host of support services, including job-market information from the application process onwards, facilitating contact with alumni and training in transferable skills. 

The same goes for postdoc support offices, which are rare in the EU in comparison with the US. Associations of PhDs and postdocs, or even junior faculty, may also make their concerns more visible and contribute to policymaking.

Increased support should come with increased selectivity. Not everyone aspiring to a position in research will be able to obtain one, so career paths need early, reliable and fair selection points during PhD programmes, postdocs and tenure-track positions to avoid protracted phases of uncertainty. 

In some EU countries, anyone with an undergraduate degree can start a PhD course. Increased selectivity may lead to fewer PhD applicants and postdocs, but by reducing dropouts, it ought not to reduce the supply of researchers. 

All fixed-term research positions should come with training in transferable skills and careers advice. Researchers should be able to make informed decisions about their careers as early as possible, and have the skills to take on a broader range of jobs in and outside of research.

This would mean training group leaders in giving feedback and understanding career options to help junior researchers’ career progression, instead of perceiving those who don’t take the traditional academic route as failures. 

Reforms to organisational structures and grant funding may also create more permanent positions. In several countries, tenured researchers’ salaries cannot be funded by grants. Allowing this could free up university money for junior researchers and act as a productivity incentive, much like giving tenured researchers flexible teaching hours. 

The growing complexity and specialisation of science has also created a need for more permanent positions besides principal investigators. This should lead to academic units becoming flatter and more collegiate, rather than hierarchies with one person at the top.

Role for EU

The potential for reform is huge, but it needs to be underpinned by strong and predictable funding—which is needed anyway to address societal challenges and deficits in competitiveness. 

The EU could play a role both directly, by applying best practice to funding schemes such as the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions, and by helping to spread learning and best practice among member states. Recently mooted plans to introduce institutional EU funding would be a welcome additional tool.

Reducing precarity in research would have many other benefits, strengthening emerging nations and reducing risk-aversion in research-intensive systems. And it would make Europe a more attractive place to do research in general, helping it in the global competition for talent. 

Jürgen Janger is a senior economist at the Austrian Institute of Economic Research in Vienna

This article also appeared in Research Europe

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Back page gossip from the 9 February issue of Research Europe

One wait over

Just when your correspondent was starting to think the European Commission’s research and innovation department had spent rather a long time under interim leadership, up popped the announcement of a new director-general (see cover).

Signe Ratso, a deputy director-general responsible for the association of non-EU countries to the bloc’s R&I programme Horizon Europe, had reached five months serving as interim director-general when the news of Marc Lemaître’s appointment broke.

It had started to look a little like the situation over at the European Institute of Innovation and Technology, where Martin Kern served as interim director for five whole years before finally being given the role proper in 2019.

The sector will no doubt be grateful to Ratso for keeping the show on the road following the departure of Jean-Eric Paquet last summer. But one wonders how easy it will be for her to return to the deputy role, having had a taste of life at the top.

In recent weeks, Ratso has travelled to South Korea and Japan to firm up their R&I ties with the EU, with both countries being candidates for Horizon Europe membership deals. As we report on P7, all has not been going entirely well with some association deals, as the European Parliament is threatening to block those agreed with New Zealand and the Faroe Islands, as well as a prospective deal with Canada, because it feels sidelined by the deals’ indefinite duration.

With Horizon Europe already more than two years into its 2021-27 lifespan, and various countries still only at the exploratory stage of their association talks, one wonders whether the negotiation process is working as it should.

The importance of parliamentary scrutiny notwithstanding, perhaps there’s an argument to be made for keeping talks to a minimum.

Vision of perfection

The EU-Life group of life sciences research institutes has teamed up with the journal Nature to host an essay contest focused on the “perfect research institute”. 

What would such an institute look like, they ask. “One that constantly adapts to the needs of different people and is open to all? One that fulfils everything you wished for? One that protects its staff from paperwork and helps them to create better science? One that’s fully funded, completely inclusive and promotes creativity above all else? How far do we dare to go in our thinking?”

If researchers’ work environments are anything like those of the Research Europe team, they’d perhaps settle for an environment in which the coffee machine isn’t permanently broken.

But researchers are thankfully more imaginative than journalists, so we expect the entries to outshine our prosaic dreams.

Applications of up to 1,000 words are welcome from anybody and are due by 9 March. The three best entrants, as judged by a panel of researchers and writers, will be invited to present their essays at the EU-Life annual conference in Lisbon in June. Top prize is €5,000, while the two runners-up will get €2,500 each. Sharpen those pencils!

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Lemaître’s appointment to crucial research post comes just in time

The top official post in the European Commission’s research and innovation department is probably the most important European-level role for the research sector, alongside the political figurehead that is the EU R&I commissioner.

So it will have been a relief to many when the Commission announced on the first of this month that the post—which has been without a permanent holder since the departure of Jean-Eric Paquet last summer—would be filled from 16 February by Marc Lemaître, currently head of the regional and urban policy department.

While Signe Ratso has been keeping the Commission R&I department steady on an interim basis, the wait for a new leader could not have continued much longer without sparking unease.

Lemaître will take up the R&I post at a vital time and with many important calls to make, as we report on this week’s cover.

The timing is partly important because of the looming prospect of change to the other vital role of R&I commissioner, held by Mariya Gabriel since 2019. Gabriel’s term is set to end next year, alongside those of her fellow Commission political leaders, and although it is possible that she could be reappointed, there is also a high chance that a new commissioner will take her place. 

So it was imperative that the R&I department got a new top official early enough this year for them to find their feet before any political changeover.

In policy terms, Lemaître will take up the reins just in time to lead the analysis of, and response to, the Commission’s survey on the bloc’s 2021-27 R&I programme, Horizon Europe, as we approach its halfway point. Sector leaders have been quick to point out the importance of this process for the EU’s long-term research planning.

This year will also see the mid-term review of the EU’s seven-year budget framework. Although this seems unlikely to have major impacts on the current R&I programme, the review could shape how Horizon Europe is swayed by political priorities. Hot topics such as microchips have a habit of encroaching on the R&I programme’s budget, and determined leadership may be needed to prevent its core instruments, such as the European Research Council, from suffering as a result.

Sector representatives have taken heart from Lemaître’s experience of running the regional department and, before that, of serving as head of cabinet to a former budget commissioner. 

He is expected to be well-placed to fight the R&I programme’s corner and ensure his new department keeps running smoothly.

A former holder of the top R&I post, Robert-Jan Smits, was one of those who told Research Europe that they hoped Lemaître would also be able to improve the ways in which dedicated EU R&I funding works with the bloc’s regional funds, which also support the sector. The need to improve such ‘synergies’ has gained attention, as more EU leaders have realised the importance of R&I to urgent challenges such as climate change and health.

With all of this in mind, Lemaître’s appointment looks to be putting the right person in the right place at the right time. Watch this space to see how it pans out.

This article also appeared in Research Europe

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Reforming research assessment will help academics reclaim scholarly communication, say Vinciane Gaillard and Stephane Berghmans

There is a disconnect between core academic values such as research ethics and integrity, diversity, equity and inclusion, collaboration, openness and knowledge-sharing, and the way that research and researchers are assessed against a narrow set of publication-based metrics. 

Research assessment reforms promise to make the intrinsic quality of research outputs—beyond journal publications—more important than their volume or where they are published. Reforming assessment also offers the academic community a route to regain control over scholarly communication. Universities, research performing organisations, researchers, funders and national libraries all have a crucial role to play in achieving this.

Until quite recently, this route forward was much less clear. And in the university sector, we must first and foremost get our own house in order. For example, European University Association (EUA) research from 2019 shows that universities make extensive use of the journal impact factor to evaluate not only individual research outputs but, worse still, researchers themselves. 

This measure was developed to help university libraries decide which journals to purchase. Over time, it and similar metrics have become proxies for quality and impact, making journal publications the main vehicle for research assessment and giving scientific publishers a disproportionately large role in the research ecosystem.

This unhealthy situation has prompted many calls for the academic community to reclaim ownership of research assessment and align it with core academic values. Many also see an inherent link to academic freedom, encompassing freedom of research, institutional autonomy and democracy. 

To enact this sea change, we have a tremendous asset, the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (Coara). Launched in 2022 by the research community, for the research community, members of this coalition have pledged to work together to enable systemic reform on the basis of common principles.

A common vision 

Coara signatories believe that the assessment of research, researchers and organisations must better recognise the diverse outputs, practices and activities that make up and maximise the quality and impact of research. This movement will empower the entire academic community to move from ‘publish or perish’ to new assessment practices. 

These will be defined by the community itself, supported by Coara as a learning platform. The coalition presents a unique opportunity to realign research assessment with core academic values. Furthermore, reforming assessment will also lead to healthier work environments and more open science. 

The agreement also sets a shared direction for changing assessment practices, basing assessment primarily on qualitative judgement, for which peer-review, supported by responsible use of quantitative indicators, is central. The development of new quantitative indicators can also help to ensure a more transparent set of metrics to support qualitative evaluation. 

Commercial companies are already active in this space and their expertise has the potential to serve the academic community well. But caution is needed: reform cannot support further revenue growth for the private sector through ownership of an even bigger share of the research process. Ownership must remain with the academic community.

Launched in 2022, the EUA’s Open Science Agenda 2025 describes how institutions and researchers have relinquished their rights in favour of commercial publishers. It calls for academic ownership of scholarly communication and publishing, in a system that is transparent, diverse, affordable, sustainable, and steered by the research community and its institutions. 

The agenda also looks to a future where scholarly documentation becomes more interoperable, with preprints, blog posts and other means of disseminating scholarly outputs complementing or even replacing traditional journals and books. 

Open access to scholarly outputs can only become an intrinsic part of the research process once open science practices receive appropriate recognition and incentives. Conversely, a more responsible, transparent and sustainable assessment system can help advance open science. Furthermore, efforts to reform research assessment may well help to strengthen the hand of university negotiators in ‘big deals’ talks with publishers.

If less becomes more thanks to rebalanced research assessment, the current scholarly publishing model, based on reputation and numbers, is likely to be transformed and scholarly communication reclaimed by the academic community. 

Vinciane Gaillard and Stephane Berghmans are, respectively, deputy director and director of research and innovation at the European University Association 

This article also appeared in Research Europe

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EU strategy needs to do more than provide infrastructure, say Daniel Spichtinger and his colleagues

Data is not the new oil, as is sometimes claimed, because, unlike oil, it can be reused. In fact, this reusability is precisely what makes data a key resource of the 21st century. A more apt comparison may be with renewable energy. 

Facilitating the reuse of data is one rationale for the EU’s data strategy, a bundle of measures aimed at creating a single market for data and at ensuring the bloc’s global competitiveness and data sovereignty.

The strategy, launched in 2020, contains legislative measures to set up a cross-sectoral governance framework for data access and use: the Data Governance Act, the Digital Markets Act, the Open Data Directive and the Data Act, each having their own target groups.  

But its most concrete ambition is to establish Common European Data Spaces in different thematic areas. These are intended to bring together relevant infrastructures and governance frameworks to facilitate data-pooling and sharing. 

The aim is to allow data from across the EU—from the public sector, businesses and other types of organisations, as well as individuals—to be made available and exchanged in a trustworthy and secure manner. 

Establishing such data spaces promises significant benefits, it but also raises many challenges. For researchers, one of the most serious is the narrow interpretation of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation put forward by the European Data Protection Supervisor and the European Data Protection Board in their Joint Opinion on the proposed Data Act released last May. This risks further weakening the research exception of the GDPR, making the collection of research data even more challenging than it already is.

Even if legal and technical hurdles are overcome, it is simplistic to assume that just making data available will automatically result in widespread reuse by researchers. Rather, we need to better understand the factors that influence whether and to what extent researchers make use of data that are shared. 

Listening to reusers

To better understand these factors, we interviewed 12 researchers who had reused data and 12 intermediaries such as publishers and repository managers who work to make data accessible.

In a recent paper, we show that some of these factors are specific to projects: researchers’ trust in a particular dataset’s quality, its suitability for purpose and whether it meets the ‘Fair’ principles of being findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. Other factors are independent of individual projects, namely researcher attitudes, community norms, rewards and requirements. 

Our interviews also illuminated whether and how researchers develop a habit of reusing data and come to see this practice as part of their professional identity. Researchers described this process using a variety of terms, like the development of a reuse mindset, while intermediaries often spoke in terms of developing researchers’ awareness of the possibilities and potential of data reuse. 

For some, this awareness was linked to using a particular product or service, such as a specific repository. For others, it was a question of creating purpose-built settings where researchers can work out how and under what conditions they can benefit from data reuse, as well as grapple with its consequences. One example is the Lab for Open Innovation in Science at the Einstein Center for Neurosciences in Berlin. 

Whether researchers actually use the planned data spaces will be an important measure of the success of the EU data strategy as a whole. Thus, encouraging researchers to consider data reuse as a modus operandi of scientific research—in other words, to make reuse a habit—should be a key priority. Otherwise, data spaces risk becoming data graveyards. 

In the area of health, the EU-funded project Towards the European Health Data Space, which seeks to develop principles for the secondary use of health data, could be a vehicle for building such habits into the social infrastructure of the European Health Data Space.  

Paying attention to how researchers understand themselves and their work would help ensure this data space is fit for purpose, while at the same time providing a proof of concept for other areas in which data spaces will be set up. On a broader, cross-thematic level, the European Open Science Cloud can potentially also play a role by building safe spaces for experimenting with data reuse into its activities, such as outreach actions. 

We realise that adding habit formation—and settings that enable it—to the issue of data sharing adds another layer of complexity, but without it data spaces won’t fly.  

Daniel Spichtinger is at the Ludwig Boltzmann Society in Vienna. Marcel LaFlamme is open research manager at the Public Library of Science. Marion Poetz is in the Department of Strategy and Innovation at Copenhagen Business School 

This article also appeared in Research Europe

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The EU’s intervention on research careers cannot come soon enough

Europe’s early career research is in crisis. The evidence is everywhere—from the number of PhD holders and postdocs leaving academia, to the extreme pressure faced by those who stay. Nearly half of Norwegian postdocs, for example, leave academia within four years, according to a 2021 study by the Nordic Institute for Studies in Innovation, Research and Education. In Italy, 40 per cent of PhD students surveyed last year by their professional body reported feeling anxious or depressed. 

The challenges faced by young researchers are the same across Europe: precarious contracts, low pay and, in many cases, the inability to break through academia’s hierarchies. These longstanding problems have been exacerbated by the effects of the pandemic and the cost of living crisis, which have hit hardest those at the start of their careers, on the lowest incomes, with the least job security. 

So news that the European Commission is mulling measures aimed at improving research careers is welcome—for early career researchers and for the continent’s R&D ambitions, which cannot be fulfilled without better support for future talent.

The creation of a new funding stream for institutions providing secure career paths for researchers is the most significant of the plans outlined to Research Europe by Portugal’s former science minister, Manuel Heitor. Funders’ potential to drive reform has been well-illustrated with the Plan S open-access movement. But so far, the power of research funding to incentivise institutions to overhaul their approach to research careers has been much-discussed and rarely harnessed.

Heitor, who has been working on the proposals, said the aim is for a pilot to be followed by a new funding line in Horizon Europe’s successor programme. This should, he says, be at a similar level to the European Research Council, which has a €16 billion budget for 2021-27. 

This scale underscores the level of ambition—as does Heitor’s comparison to the ERC, widely seen as Horizon Europe’s jewel. Such references are rarely accidental.

Former ERC president Jean-Pierre Bourguignon, who was instrumental in drawing up a manifesto for early career researchers last year, told a conference in Brussels last June: “Europe cannot afford to let its future workforce be drastically affected at a time when a global battle for talent is raging.”

The Commission’s involvement is a clear signal that the severity of the problem has been recognised at the EU’s highest levels. But it is also an indictment of the failure of national governments to do more. 

While some countries are putting in place measures to address cost of living rises for early career researchers, the legacy of governments’ widespread failure to support emerging research talent is as much behind today’s crisis as more recent global challenges, if not more. The Commission’s move should be seen as a rallying cry to national politicians—who can implement initiatives much faster than at the ­pan-European level—to act before even more of this generation’s talent is lost. 

As the balance of research power globally shifts to new players, including China, Europe can ill afford to leave these problems unsolved. 

This article also appeared in Research Europe 

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Back page gossip from the 26 January issue of Research Europe

From the same hymn sheet

This month, as Research Europe readers will know, Sweden took on the rotating presidency of the Council of EU governments, meaning it will host meetings of the bloc’s ministers and help shape their priorities for the first half of the year.

As a way of better acquainting the country to its neighbours, the presidency created a Spotify playlist of songs produced by what the presidency described as Sweden’s “world-famous” music industry. The playlist opened, somewhat predictably, with Abba and included The Final Countdown by the appropriately named band Europe.

More eye-catching to your correspondent than the playlist itself was the presidency’s assertion that “Sweden is a net music exporter, meaning that it exports more music than it imports”. Quite how the country measures something so intangible is unclear, but as a scientific publication we doff our cap to the statistically minded take.

Strangely, no mention was made of the fact that Spotify itself is a Swedish company, with its headquarters in Stockholm. Perhaps this was because in 2016 Spotify’s founders wrote an open letter to national politicians threatening to export jobs to the US unless they altered Sweden’s educational and regulatory environments to make them more conducive to growth.

With so few fellow big technology companies based in Europe, perhaps the founders’ situation felt a little too similar to that set out in such heartfelt fashion in the second entry on the presidency’s playlist, Robyn’s smash hit Dancing on My Own.

Property at stake

Like much of the pharmaceutical industry, Moderna is fiercely protective of its intellectual property. The US biotechnology firm is currently engaged in a bitter legal dispute with Pfizer and BioNTech over the mRNA technology it used to develop its Covid-19 vaccine.

But your correspondent was pleased to see that signs the more collaborative approach that helped the world get through the pandemic can still be found.

In an interview for the Funding Insight section of Research Professional News, Moderna’s Alfred Pappo outlined the company’s international doctoral fellowship programme supporting mRNA science. Pappo, director of global medical affairs operations, said he was not aware of any similar fellowship opportunity in this area of research.

As for intellectual property, “IP considerations are negotiated on a case-by-case basis,” he said. 

Your correspondent only queries whether a power imbalance might exist during such negotiations.

Feet on the ground

The R&D policy world is familiar with academics being criticised as residing in ‘an ivory tower’. But this month it was European Parliament president Roberta Metsola who insisted her institution was “not in some imaginary ivory tower”, when setting out plans to increase its transparency. With neither academics nor MEPs wanting to be seen to be living in the clouds, perhaps prices on European high-rise properties will soon plummet.

The post Inside out appeared first on Research Professional News.

Research needs to be globally coordinated, decolonised and much more interdisciplinary, says Abdulrafiu Abbas

There are 83 months until 2030, and 323 months until 2050. The technology needed to achieve net zero carbon emissions in this timeframe is proven and available—but we also need the policy and courage to deploy it.

November’s COP27 meeting showed a stark disconnect between governments’ words and goals on climate change and their actions, with 400 private jets delivering world leaders and eco-preachers to Sharm el-Sheikh.

This disconnect is also visible in climate research. My studies of the spread of spending have found, for example, that despite lip-service to the importance of interdisciplinarity, the bulk of effort still goes into mitigation—into finding technologies to decarbonise energy generation, transport, industry and so on. 

Even though the target to limit global temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels is officially still in place, many scientists now see that as unreachable. Climate research for a world headed beyond 1.5°C needs to be vastly broader. 

For example, between 1990 and 2020, less than one per cent of climate research funding went into studies of interventions aimed at reducing the Earth’s capacity to absorb solar energy, such as stratospheric aerosol injection, marine cloud brightening and developing high-albedo crops and buildings. While such solar geoengineering is controversial, increased research funding in this area is much needed.

Other fields are similarly neglected. Neuroscience received 0.022 per cent of climate research funding over the same period, despite its potential to help understand the brain science behind interventions that might influence behavioural change and decision-making, not to mention the fear and trauma caused by extreme weather events and the shadow of catastrophic climate change.

Another example is theology, divinity and religious studies, which have received 0.046 per cent of climate change research funding. Such disciplines offer improved understanding of the spiritual implications of climate change and low-carbon transitions, including how they may reshape connections to the environment or promote values geared towards sustainability. 

And while extreme weather events are impacting major sporting events, and climate change has a negative effect on physical activity, only 0.012 per cent of climate research funding has gone to sports science. 

Funding also needs to be redesigned: in an interdisciplinary team, it can take months for people to understand each other’s terminology and methods; a 2-3 year grant is unfit for such purposes and is unlikely to produce high-impact research. Allocating funding via predominantly discipline-focused bodies, such as the UK research councils, hinders the development of a whole-systems approach that integrates engineering, environmental and technical solutions with economic, behavioural and policy interventions, and which aims to influence industry, business, government, third-sector organisations and the public.

Shaping the research

Interdisciplinarity should be part of an effort to align climate research more closely with the UN sustainable development goals. Climate change affects human rights, gender equity and every other SDG. Climate researchers need more awareness of these agendas and how to shape their research around them. 

This should include a greater effort to decolonise climate research. Between them, the UK, US and EU account for a large majority of climate research funding. The dominance of researchers in the global north contrasts with the impacts of climate change, which fall heaviest on the Global South.

This raises questions around issues of justice, equity and sincerity in funding for climate R&D. Scholars in the Global South have huge expertise, especially on adapting to climate change and often specific to their locations, but they tend to end up as assistants on projects run from the north. 

Decolonising research can begin with scientists reflecting on the power relations contained in their research topics, teams and processes; by considering research participants as collaborators and co-designers, and by using different ontological and epistemological perspectives and disciplines, which may challenge the perspectives and methodologies of the global north. The principles of inclusion and just governance should permeate climate research.

Finally, there needs to be a global effort to coordinate climate research, similar to the efforts of the World Health Organization to organise action on health and Unicef on education. A global organisation charged with coordinating research on climate and the green transition would help to ensure that gaps are covered and overlap avoided.  

Abdulrafiu Abbas is a researcher in energy and climate technology innovation at the Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex, UK

This article also appeared in Research Europe

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EU Council’s holistic stance on universities’ societal mission is a welcome change, says Julien Chicot

In December, the Council of the EU adopted two important initiatives to boost innovation. Its conclusions on the New European Innovation Agenda (NEIA) and recommendations on the guiding principles for knowledge valorisation—the utilisation of research results—contribute to a systemic approach to innovation with a view to better support the development of innovation ecosystems.

This is a positive step for two reasons. First, it remedies the European Commission’s original communication on the NEIA, released last June, which omitted any mention of the importance of research—part of a wider pattern of the Commission underplaying the role of research in innovation.

The Council, in contrast, stressed the need to “strengthen investments in fundamental research for the creation of new knowledge and capacities enabling all types of innovation”. 

Any policy mix designed to enhance innovation must include effective measures to support research. There’s always a need for research to produce new knowledge to drive innovation. 

EU innovation policy must avoid the short-term view that investments in challenge-oriented and applied research have the highest return. Instead, it should strengthen high-risk high-reward research as part of a strategy to create knowledge and therefore public value. 

Recent analyses show that curiosity-driven research funded by the European Research Council (ERC) has had an outstanding track record in terms of innovation. This includes contributions to tackling some of Europe’s most urgent challenges, including the response to Covid-19. But while knowledge creation is necessary for innovation, it is not sufficient. 

The second positive aspect of last month’s announcements was their emphasis on innovation as a product of systems where many different entities interact in different ways. This is a welcome sign that policymakers are moving beyond a linear view of the relationship between research and innovation.

‘Decisive role of knowledge’ 

Innovation does not involve simply commercialising scientific breakthroughs or exploiting knowledge produced by past research activities. Rather, it requires many steps along the path from laboratory to market.

For innovation ecosystems to develop, other things not connected to research are required. This is where the Council of the EU’s acknowledgement of “the decisive role of knowledge valorisation activities”—societal and economic impacts from knowledge—comes in. 

The exploitation of research outcomes is a complex task that requires the right know-how and mindset, and often specialised support. Universities can assist researchers, for instance, with the management of intellectual property, access to finance, and the initiation of partnerships with business actors to accelerate the market uptake of their innovations. 

Through policy initiatives to create the European Research Area, and through the money the EU already spends on the third pillar of Horizon Europe dedicated to innovation, the EU would do well to strengthen, and invest in, universities’ capacities for knowledge transfer activities. Innovation activities in Europe also need an empowering regulatory framework, as well as guidance and tools to perform specific tasks such as the elaboration of IP strategy. 

During the Education and Innovation Summit last June, Commissioner for research and innovation Mariya Gabriel stressed that universities must be given the means to become powerhouses of innovation to support the implementation of the NEIA. 

Such an expression of support is welcome, as long as it recognises that the role of universities in innovation ecosystems is multi-faceted, and not limited to the production of knowledge and human capital. Universities create public value; they act as intermediaries between new knowledge and wider society. In innovation, this translates into the fostering of innovation ecosystems, including creating science parks and boosting entrepreneurship. But additionally, through the transdiciplinary and interdisciplinary knowledge they generate, universities have a capacity to provide societally relevant directions to innovation.

For all these reasons, a systemic approach needs to run through all present and future EU policies on research and innovation, engaging all the actors involved and leveraging the many roles each can play. 

For the European Commission, this implies increasing investment in frontier research across all disciplines, including the social sciences and humanities. And it means ensuring that universities have the financial and regulatory tools to strengthen Europe as an innovation powerhouse while keeping true to themselves and their core mission. 

Julien Chicot is senior policy officer at the Guild of Research-Intensive Universities

This article also appeared in Research Europe

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Back page gossip from the 12 January issue of Research Europe

Keeping the party going…

Someone at the European Space Agency apparently didn’t want to let the festivities of Christmas and the new year end when they returned to work after the break.

The agency said it was “kicking off the new year” by inviting the public to create a new non-alcoholic cocktail—also known as a ‘mocktail’—to celebrate the planned launch this year of ‘Juice’, an Esa mission to explore the moons of the planet Jupiter.

“Whether you take inspiration from the creamy swirls of Jupiter’s atmosphere, from the layered structure of the ice moons, or from the challenging operations needed to fly to and around the extreme space environment of the Jupiter system, we look forward to seeing how the mission whets your appetite for creating a tasty #SpaceJuice recipe!” the agency said.

Entrants are being asked to share a photo of their drink on social media, along with an explanation of how each ingredient represents an element of the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer mission.

First prize is an invitation to attend a launch event, while nine runners-up will receive mission-related gadgets.

Entrants shouldn’t get too carried away, however. While they may use “fruit/vegetable juices, creams, coffee, carbonated drinks, food colourings, syrups etc”, as well as garnishes, Esa stressed: “The juice recipe must not contain any alcohol.”

An extra opportunity to help promote the mission is also being offered to an “expert juice maker/mocktail mixologist”, but only if they have a social media following of at least 10,000 people. Plenty of people in the R&D policy world meet that follower requirement, and we look forward to seeing your entries—plus feel free to get in touch with a recommended strengthener, purely off the record, of course.

…and the wolves away

While the European Parliament has been shaken in recent weeks by the arrest of one of its vice-presidents over suspicions of corruption (see P7), rumours of a much less serious nature about power and influence in European politics have also captured attention.

According to media reports, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has called for an “in-depth analysis” of the risks posed by resurgent wolf populations, after her own pony was sadly mauled to death by a wolf in rural Germany last year.

“There have been numerous reports of wolf attacks on animals, and of increased risk to local people,” von der Leyen reportedly wrote to MEPs. “Understandably, this situation raises questions in the affected regions about whether the current protection status of wolves is justified.”

Wolf numbers have surged across Europe, alongside populations of other depleted animals, including wild boar, as a result of conservation efforts. While some farmers and members of the public have questioned the wisdom of such moves, the attentions of the Commission president may hold particular sway. Hopefully there will be a full scientific consideration of the pros and cons before any action is taken.

The post Inside out appeared first on Research Professional News.

The EU should extend a warmer welcome to Horizon Europe

A new year is traditionally a time for new beginnings, and the way has been paved for Europe’s researchers to set up some of their own—in the form of partnerships with peers in New Zealand. 

In late December, the European Commission announced that the country had reached agreement to become a member of Horizon Europe—albeit in just one of the three pillars (see P7). This will make it the first far-flung state to take part in the flagship R&D programme on similar terms to those in the EU.

New Zealand’s innovation ministry wasted no time in exhorting its researchers and organisations to “form consortia and prepare projects” for bids in Horizon’s January-to-March application window. The agreement has been warmly greeted by research organisations on both sides of the world, but the restricted nature of New Zealand’s involvement—after a protracted negotiation—has caused frustration. Europe needs to make up its mind: just how open does it want its research activities to be?

Tensions between protecting EU member state interests and broadening the bloc’s influence by opening opportunities to others are nothing new. But with research, members’ interests would seem much better served by pushing the door open, rather than nudging it ajar. 

Numerous heads of European research groups lined up again this week to argue that the EU should open Horizon Europe association to “as many excellent and like-minded countries as possible”, as Cesaer secretary-general Mattias Björnmalm put it. Crucially, they want countries such as New Zealand—whose expertise and ambitions fit with the EU’s, and whose size is not likely to overwhelm Horizon Europe—to be offered access to all pillars. They also repeated calls for invitations to be extended to near neighbours the UK and Switzerland, which remain barred amid political disputes with the bloc.

Björnmalm points out that having more countries pay to access the full programme would increase the size and impact of Horizon Europe for all, while not hitting funding available to European researchers—associated countries would pay in roughly what they get out. With this and the enhanced opportunity for collaboration, it should be one of those rare occasions where everybody wins. So why is the EU holding out? 

In the case of the UK and Switzerland’s exclusion, the political gambit is clear, even though—with little sign of capitulation from either in wider disputes with the bloc—it is increasingly hard to justify the harm being done to research efforts. The hiatus is also stacking up resourcing problems, with UK researchers still being encouraged to bid to programmes while they wait for a final verdict. European Research Council head Maria Leptin this week highlighted that this was adding to intense strain on ERC administrative staff (see P6).

The logic for opening only one area of the programme to New Zealand—and potentially others the EU is negotiating with, such as Canada—is much less apparent. It may partly come down to a simple overabundance of caution. 

Resolutions made rashly are prone to fail. But it would be a real opportunity lost if the expansion of Horizon Europe, which has been building for years and is almost universally seen as positive, is implemented too softly for its presence to be felt. 

This article also appeared in Research Europe.

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War in Ukraine, publishing prices and more—the biggest opinion pieces of the year

In 2022, the war in Ukraine, publishing problems and the path from the pandemic produced some of our hardest-hitting opinion articles.

Selected by our editorial team, these are the Research Professional News opinion pieces on the issues that shaped the research agenda this year.

1. Ukraine’s research community needs coordinated support 
(29 September)

Crisis-mode response must now shift to a more long-term and strategic effort, says Oksana Seumenicht

2. Just the first two years (30 March)

No immunity means no libraries, no travel and no end in sight, writes Martin Eve

3. A fair pricing model for open access (15 September)

Publishing charges should reflect local economic realities, say Faranah Osman and Johan Rooryck

4. War in Ukraine means a new era for big science (24 March)

Russia’s invasion has upended the politics of Europe’s largest research facilities, says Katharina Cramer

5. After Johnson, the science lobby must change tactics 
(13 July)

The academic establishment should stop lending credibility to populist snake oil, says David Walker

6. Brussels infighting is strangling the European Innovation Council (14 July)

Parliament will resist Commission efforts to curb new funder’s independence, says MEP Christian Ehler

7. It’s getting so universities can’t afford to win funding 
(15 November)

Bridging gaps between grants and projects’ costs is increasingly difficult, says Lorna Wilson

8. Kwarteng’s ESRC intervention crosses a line (10 February)

Rejection of recommendation for council’s executive chair undermines all of UK research, says Will Hutton

9. Make this REF the last (4 May)

Global forces now drive the changes that national evaluations sought to promote, says Jonathan Adams

10. Rankings could undermine research-evaluation reforms 
(10 February)

League tables threaten EU plans to end culture of publish or perish, says Silvia Gómez Recio

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Existing laws can protect researchers and universities—if the Commission uses them—says Kurt Deketelaere

Is academic freedom sufficiently protected in the EU? 

It would be easy to be complacent, based on intentions such as the call to develop a Europe-wide monitoring system for academic freedom set out in last year’s European Research Area (ERA) policy agenda.

But the agenda is voluntary and so far only 15 of the 27 EU member states have committed to its recommendations.

Even more worrying to researchers should be non-profit organisation Scholars at Risk’s annual report detailing attacks on higher education communities around the world. Of the 391 incidents in 65 countries described in last month’s edition, eight took place in EU member states: six in Greece and two in Poland. 

The European Parliament’s creation of a forum for academic freedom, which launched last week, is a positive step. Among other things, the forum aims to produce an independent annual report about the state of academic freedom in the EU.

But the picture remains worrying, and there is more to do to strengthen legal protection in the EU and ensure it is used. 

In a forthcoming update of its paper ‘Academic Freedom as a Fundamental Right’, the League of European Research Universities explores what legal tools the European Commission has in this area, primarily in EU law, but also in frameworks such as the European Convention on Human Rights and the United Nations’ International Covenants on Civil, Political, Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. 

Leru’s analysis of national, European and international legislation and jurisprudence identifies three aspects of academic freedom: an individual right for students, teachers and researchers; an institutional right for universities; and an obligation for states to respect and protect academic freedom. There is, in other words, a clear link between academic freedom and both education and research. 

Research muscle

In education, the EU has very limited competences. EU treaties allow the bloc only to support, coordinate or supplement actions by member states. In research, the EU’s competences are much broader, as the realisation of the ERA and the Framework Programme shows. 

It is unfortunate, then, that the European Commission mostly treats academic freedom as an educational matter, and consequently shies away from action when that freedom is in danger. In several answers to questions from MEPs, the Commission has never mentioned or made use of the link between academic freedom and research.

However, alongside its treaties, the EU has its Charter of Fundamental Rights. Article 13 of the charter stipulates: “The arts and scientific research shall be free of constraint. Academic freedom shall be respected.” 

The charter has the same legal force as the treaties, and so offers some legal protection against violations of academic freedom. This was shown in October 2020, when the European Court of Justice ruled, in a case brought by the Commission, that Hungary’s regulatory campaign against the Central European University in Budapest violated the World Trade Organization’s General Agreement on Trade in Services (Gats), the EU charter’s provisions on academic freedom, freedom to found higher education institutions and freedom to conduct a business, as well as the freedoms of establishment and free movement of services embedded in the EU treaties.

Even so, the court’s decision reinforced the view of many that, on its own, Article 13 does not give enough legal protection to academic freedom. Member states are also subject to the charter only when they are implementing EU law. While Leru believes that this includes many issues relating to academic freedom, there may still be situations where no links with EU law can be established and so the charter will not apply. 

EU law therefore needs to provide better protection for academic freedom. Leru’s paper makes four recommendations. 

First, academic freedom should not be reduced to a solely educational matter, and thus left with the member states. Second, the Commission needs to make more use of EU treaty competences on research, freedom of establishment, free movement of services and so on. 

Third, there should be more effort to push and test the application of Article 13. Finally, the EU should be more vigorous in applying international law it has signed up to, such as Gats.

Best of all would be to insert clear protection for academic freedom into the EU treaties. Article 179 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU, which covers the ERA, would be an ideal home for a commitment to protect and promote academic freedom as an individual and institutional right. 

Kurt Deketelaere is Secretary-General the League of European Research Universities, professor of law at KU Leuven and Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Helsinki

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Contradictory demands risk undermining European Universities Initiative, say Silvia Gomez Recio and Chiara Colella

The European Universities Initiative has changed the face of higher education in Europe since its inception in September 2017. The 44 alliances set up under the EUI so far—set to become 60 by the end of 2024—are giving universities a new identity at the European level and a higher profile in the EU debate than ever before. This brings both opportunities and challenges. 

Supported by funding from the EU’s Erasmus+ scheme, these alliances of universities across Europe are pioneering new models of cooperation, implementing digital platforms, innovating in teaching, and boosting collaboration with other sectors and their communities. There is less focus, however, on the challenges they face. Deadlines are tight, winning funding is a constant struggle, and alliances operate in an extremely competitive environment.

It is important to recall that the EUI started as a pilot: success and failure should be equally valuable. So what is expected of the EUI? How have alliances evolved over time? And does their format match their objectives? 

The initiative launched with the aim of transforming how universities in Europe operate and collaborate. This was a grand enough ambition, but since the second round of alliances kicked off in 2020, the world has become less predictable, reshaping objectives and increasing demands for universities to address societal challenges. Combined with their political prominence, this has left alliances facing expectations to deliver on many more fronts than originally envisaged, from immediate crises such as the war in Ukraine to long-term goals such as the green transition.

The expanding expectations pull in multiple directions and risk diverting alliances from their original missions, so that their main objective becomes winning enough funding to continue. This would put them in a compromising position when called to share their views on the EUI’s future and shows why it is important to distinguish alliances’ role from that of university networks, and ensure that those leading policy advocacy are not financially bound by the initiative. 

What’s more, asking alliances to achieve everything expected with four-year Erasmus+ grants is asking a great deal. The mismatch between ambitions and means puts an enormous strain on the alliances, the institutions involved, and the people working to make them a success. 

All this puts the EUI’s original objectives at risk of being submerged by political negotiations, financial shortcomings and governance challenges. Instead of building something unique, the alliances would end up putting a fresh coat of paint on an old house. 

The EUI should go back to its roots and reflect on its first years. If there is a need for more time and different tools, then ways should be found to provide them. 

Multiple partnerships

Alliances are charged with transforming how universities operate in many areas: innovative education, research cooperation, new mobility models. But they are expected to do so within a single configuration of partners, whereas the institutions that make up alliances have other, separate partnerships and strategies. It is important that the EUI is not seen as a panacea, and that policymakers and institutions keep an open mind on complementary forms of cooperation and bottom-up initiatives that might achieve the same goals, perhaps even better. 

Similarly, many alliances are overlaid onto pre-existing university networks. These structures need to work synergistically, with differences understood and preserved to avoid duplication of effort and to foster positive complementarities. While alliances experiment with new models of cooperation, networks represent the interests of universities in Europe with an independent voice, much broader scope and more flexibility. 

As the final reports from the first alliances from 2019 are being prepared, several EU studies have been launched to evaluate the EUI. It’s important to use the right tools. Numbers and quantitative indicators—of students travelling, programmes launched or joint activities—will not capture transformations in how institutions are collaborating, nor reveal how cross-institution working enriches education and research. They will not show how exposure to different perspectives and experiences changes how staff respond to challenges, nor how the power of exchanging and working together at such a level of integration helps institutions achieve more than any could alone. 

With more alliances planned, more still expected and the negotiations for the next EU budget period, starting in 2028, already on the horizon, the EUI is at a crucial moment. This is the time to reflect on where it is going, and how to use everyone’s resources in the best way to ensure its success.

Silvia Gomez Recio and Chiara Colella are secretary general and policy officer, respectively, at the Young European Research Universities Network 

This article also appeared in Research Europe

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Back page gossip from the 8 December issue of Research Europe

Coming home to roost

In recent weeks, the European Commission has taken action to protect the law both in and outside the EU.

The Commission announced on the last day of November that it thought Hungary had not made enough progress with legal reforms required for it to receive any payments from the EU’s Covid-19 recovery fund (see P4). The Commission also proposed to freeze payment of €7.5 billion allocated to the country from EU regional funds for the same reason.

Long-term readers of Research Europe will remember that in 2020 the EU’s top court ruled that the government of Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán had violated the bloc’s charter of fundamental rights in forcing the Central European University to move most of its activities out of Budapest. 

Member state governments in the Council of the EU will now take a view on the Commission’s position. Meanwhile, some members of the European Parliament referenced Orbán’s actions towards the CEU when announcing the creation of a new annual monitor of academic freedom (see P6). Many MEPs have welcomed the Commission’s stance on Hungary, including Terry Reintke, president of the Greens/EFA political group.

“To defend rule of law is the basis of the work of the Commission as guardian of the EU treaties,” she said. “Now it’s up to the Council to stand up for European values…If the EU is unable to uphold basic democratic standards and the rule of law in one member state, then it will no longer be a club of democracies.”

Rebuilding research

Meanwhile, on the same day it announced its Hungary position, the Commission also revealed it was “ready to work with the international community on setting up an ad hoc international tribunal or a specialised ‘hybrid’ tribunal to investigate and prosecute Russia’s crime of aggression” against Ukraine.

It said 14 EU member states had already individually joined Ukraine in commencing “investigations into international crimes committed by Russia” for invading its neighbour. But it added that, while the EU “fully supports” the International Criminal Court, Russia does not accept the jurisdiction of the ICC, meaning it cannot be prosecuted by it. Hence, the Commission proposed the creation of a special international court or tribunal, either of which it said would need the “strong backing” of the United Nations. 

The Commission also proposed a way to support Ukraine using the proceeds from seized Russian assets. It said the eventual return of some of these assets to Russia could be linked to a peace agreement compensating Ukraine for the damages it has suffered.

Such damages include research and education infrastructure: according to the Save Schools initiative, almost 2,800 education institutions in Ukraine have now been damaged by the Russian invasion, and 337 have been “destroyed completely”. 

With the estimated cost of rebuilding Ukraine running to hundreds of billions of euros, the need to find ways to fund the reconstruction and hold those responsible to account is increasingly pressing. Democracy demands it. 

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Europe’s research sector ends the year hoping for a better future

At the start of the year, with Covid vaccination levels steadily rising, Europe—and much of the world—was looking forward to a return to some kind of normality. Instead, it was faced with Russia’s shocking invasion of Ukraine, a conflict that threw it further off course. 

The war, and the knock-on energy crisis, has defined the year for much of Europe, sending huge shockwaves through the continent. Research is no exception. The year ends with the sector caught up in the fallout from these seismic events, as well as trying to navigate winds whipped up from within its own community. 

As we explore in our 2022 review, even though Ukrainian forces appear to be recovering ground, the country’s researchers and universities continue to need support—and will do so for many years to come, whatever the war’s ultimate outcome. 

Meanwhile, spiralling energy prices are causing some universities across Europe to extend winter breaks and forcing many to increase hardship funds for students and staff hit by the cost of living crisis. Major research facilities—including Cern—have plans in place for blackouts while hoping they won’t be needed. With winter only beginning, the impact of the crisis will take months to play out.

As we report this week, momentum is rapidly rising for reform of research assessment, with almost 350 organisations joining a coalition created to bring about changes set out in the EU-coordinated Agreement on Research Assessment Reform.

The coalition’s vice-chair, Karen Stroobants, acknowledges it faces “a challenging time ahead” in translating that momentum into the change envisaged by the agreement, which aims to abandon “inappropriate” use of metrics and achieve recognition for a greater diversity of research roles. 

This will be particularly tough given the need to achieve buy-in from national governments, with such shifts in emphasis likely to affect many countries’ assessment regimes. Nonetheless, the growing push for change and the potential repercussions have echoes of the Plan S open-access movement altering the research landscape. 

Another nascent shift is emerging at the European Research Council. The funder, known for its sole focus on research excellence, has made intriguing hints at folding in wider contributions to research and society as part of its evaluation process. While the ERC is at pains to state that excellence will remain its sole evaluation criterion, this is one to watch next year.

In other areas, however, progress anticipated in 2022 has turned out to be little more than bluster. Horizon Europe is still short of its ambitions to be a global research powerhouse, with Canada and New Zealand’s memberships of the R&D programme still under negotiation. Meanwhile, the UK and Switzerland’s continued lock-out due to political differences is to research’s detriment, and a shameful waste of potential.

Unlikely though it may seem, let’s hope that long-running talks end in a happy homecoming to the Horizon fold for these nations in the coming months. Europe’s research sector is facing both immense challenge and a wave of opportunity. For both, it needs like-minded allies to help it plot the right course.

This article also appeared in Research Europe

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Tackling climate change means ending prejudice against interdisciplinarity, say Guillermo Cisneros Pérez and Louise Drogoul 

Sustainability, particularly related to climate change and its impacts, is the single greatest challenge facing our societies. Changing weather patterns are causing heatwaves, storms and droughts that are bringing huge suffering across the world.

The global research community is putting ever more effort into understanding climate change and achieving net-zero emissions of greenhouse gases. But science alone cannot solve the climate crisis. The challenge of achieving net zero is social, human and ethical as well as technological. 

Engineers need training to give them an understanding of the ethical and social consequences of technical solutions. Research organisations need to address complex challenges in an interdisciplinary way if they are to make the greatest possible contribution to sustainability.

In 2020 the European association of leading universities of science and technology (Cesaer), the International Sustainable Campus Network, Science Europe and the University of Strathclyde in the UK formed a Sustainability Task ForceSustainability Task Force based on a shared vision of a collaborative, systems-based approach, where research and education institutions work together with society to contribute towards hitting net zero. 

This alliance will reconvene each year at the United Nations climate change conference, to take stock of progress and plan the next moves. Last year’s COP26 meeting in Glasgow, for example, saw the launch of a call for collective global action to tackle climate change. 

This year’s meeting, at COP27 in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, focused on interdisciplinary research and education to tackle climate change. It was organised with the European University Association and the Network of Universities from the Capitals of Europe, which have joined the partnership, and followed up on a call to policymakers in January emphasising the importance of interdisciplinary research.

Such endeavours highlight the growing interest in interdisciplinarity as a means for universities to contribute to addressing societal challenges and pursue their civic missions. Interdisciplinarity is not new in higher education—academic disciplines have always shown a degree of flexibility in combining different disciplines to confront emerging problems—but it is a moving target. The Covid-19 pandemic, for example, prompted universities to find new ways to break down silos, adopt ways of working and encourage greater cooperation across sectors.

From academic programmes and degrees dedicated to sustainability to challenge-based learning approaches, interdisciplinarity is relatively well established in higher education. For education and research around sustainability, exposure to interdisciplinarity brings an understanding of the wider societal impact of research and enhances students’ and researchers’ ability to contribute to tackling global challenges. 

Narrow career paths

Students are hungry for such teaching and training. When they enter the workplace, however, they find that early career paths tend to still be narrow, lying within single disciplinary domains, and that employers do not always recognise the value of an interdisciplinary background compared with more traditional training. This applies in industry and commercial firms, but it is especially true in research and academic careers, where open positions tend to have very concrete specifications.

As a result, this generation of students and early career researchers feels a mismatch between what the world needs, especially when it comes to climate change, and a job market that prioritises expertise in a single field. Some areas of the job market still undervalue training—especially interdisciplinary training—in the social sciences and humanities. This stigma must be combated.

Interdisciplinarity must also be better embedded into university culture. Currently, engagement in transdisciplinary teaching and research is often an add-on, and interdisciplinary research projects tend to have lower funding success. This discourages the pursuit of an interdisciplinary career. 

There need to be more incentives for interdisciplinary approaches, such as rewards and credits assigned to students and researchers, combined with effective funding approaches. This ties into broader efforts underway in Europe, by Cesaer and others, to support researchers’ careers by reforming research assessment. 

The universities allied under CESAER will showcase their commitments in a white paper on how they contribute to sustainability in Madrid in October next year. Universities must be bold and collaborative; let’s embrace interdisciplinarity to secure our future.  

Guillermo Cisneros Pérez is rector of Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, director of the Cesaer group of science and technology universities and chair of its Sustainability Task Force. Louise Drogoul is Advisor for Innovation and Sustainability at Cesaer  

This article also appeared in Research Europe

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Annual tussle over research funding should face the final curtain

Those working in Europe’s R&D sector were able to breathe a sigh of relief again this month, as EU institutions agreed not to implement a huge threatened cut to the annual budget of the bloc’s research and innovation programme.

As we report, national governments in the Council of the EU backed down from their push to cut €663 million from the €12.343 billion 2023 budget proposed for Horizon Europe by the European Commission.

Ostensibly, they were talked down by MEPs in the European Parliament who had countered with a demand for the programme to get €311m more than the Commission suggested.

Three weeks of negotiations settled on a budget of €12.353bn, which is an increase of about €10m on the Commission proposal and of about €114m on 2022.

This outcome was broadly welcomed by the sector, albeit with caveats about cuts for certain parts of the programme and concern about the loss of unspent funding from previous years. There was also some disquiet over plans to take funding from Horizon Europe in future to pay for part of a new system of secure communication satellites.

In truth, though, it all felt very familiar. Every year as Christmas nears, the Council adopts the role of miser, seeking to stem any seasonal generosity from its co-negotiators by pushing for belt-tightening and hungry mouths. And each year the Parliament then rises up in defence of the threatened programmes, which inevitably include R&I funds, rallying the sector behind MEPs as they face off against finance ministers in a public display of strength.

It’s difficult to discern how much of this amounts to pageantry versus genuine struggle. Do finance ministers and their bosses really want to cut more than half a billion euros from the programmes they must know are the only ones that can meaningfully respond to global crises like climate change and pandemics? And do MEPs really think they can get governments to swing wildly in the opposite direction, or do they merely know that a ridiculous call for cuts must be countered with a similarly sized push for gains?

Cynics might think the sector would welcome the chance to restate the importance of research spending. But in fact, it seems to be growing increasingly frustrated with what Kurt Deketelaere, secretary general of the League of European Research Universities, described as a “foolish annual battle”.

Leru is among a growing number of stakeholders, including the European Association of Research and Technology Organisations, that are calling for the EU’s R&I budget to be ringfenced to put an end to the yearly institutional showdown.

Such funding is too important to be subject to these enormous yearly claims and counter-claims. They are an unwelcome cause of uncertainty for researchers and a distraction from more meaningful discussions about how to improve the sector.

Whether the tussle is a genuine fight with a billion euros in the balance or an exaggerated pantomime performed for reasons known only to the EU institutions, it’s time for this particular seasonal show to be discontinued. 

This article also appeared in Research Europe

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Back page gossip from the 24 November issue of Research Europe

 A tale of two negotiations

While this month brought fairly positive developments for EU research and innovation funding, with a deal on the 2023 budget that included a slight uplift for the Horizon Europe R&I programme (see cover), the story was a very different one at the UN’s annual Climate Change Conference—at least from a European perspective.

Less economically developed nations and environmental campaigners welcomed an agreement to create a fund via which richer countries that have been most responsible for climate change will partially reimburse the losses of poorer countries most affected by it. But European leaders were generally unhappy with the lack of broader progress at the COP27 meeting in Egypt.

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said she was “pleased COP27 has opened a new chapter on financing loss and damage, and laid the foundations for a new method for solidarity between those in need and those in a position to help”.

However, she said that “much more is needed”, as the deal reached by politicians from across the world failed to secure meaningful new commitments on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. 

“We have treated some of the symptoms but not cured the patient from its fever,” von der Leyen warned. “COP27 has kept alive the goal of [limiting global warming to] 1.5C [above pre-industrial levels]. Unfortunately however, it has not delivered on a commitment by the world’s major emitters to phase down fossil fuels, nor new commitments on climate mitigation.”

Her second-in-command on the issue, Frans Timmermans, did not hold back when addressing global leaders in a final plenary session at the meeting, where he said that negotiating teams had been “exhausted” by the effort to square their differences.

“Time and tiredness are no excuse to stop going. And the world will not thank us when they hear only excuses tomorrow,” Timmermans said.

Addressing head-on the issue of why more ambitious targets had not been agreed, he complained: “Many parties, too many parties, are not ready to make more progress today in the fight against the climate crisis. There were too many attempts to even roll back what we agreed [last year].”

This was despite what Timmermans described as heartbreaking contributions from countries including Pakistan, whose leaders set out how the country had been ravaged by floods caused by extreme weather this year.

Reflecting on the process and its outcomes, the chair of the European Parliament delegation to the meeting, Greens MEP Bas Eickhout, said he was “sad that we are so far from achieving the Paris climate goal” of limiting warming to 1.5C. 

But he said he remained “optimistic that, despite all the prophecies of doom, the multilateral process has not collapsed”.

Renewed cooperation between the United States and China offers reason to be hopeful, according to Eickhout. Even so, the world has walked away from yet another climate meeting hoping that it will be the next one that finally brings real progress.  

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Progress will unravel without improved research funding and strategy, say Mark Lawler and Richard Sullivan

Europe is facing a cancer crisis—one that could set back cancer outcomes by a decade if urgent action is not taken.

The economic and social impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic, subsequent national lockdowns and the Russian invasion of Ukraine have been disastrous for cancer care across Europe. These challenges, combined with the emerging global cost-of-living crisis, will all have a detrimental effect on the funding of cancer care and research.

Research is not a luxury in this picture; it is an essential and integral part of modern European cancer care. Research-active hospitals that participate in clinical trials have better patient outcomes and adopt innovation more rapidly than those which do not.

Many countries risk seeing two decades of progress—better survival, reduced mortality—undone by the events of the past two and a half years. Such a retreat would be unacceptable; to avert it, we, as part of the European Groundshot Commission on Cancer Research convened through The Lancet Oncology, are calling for a new strategy and a doubling of the European cancer research budget, to €50 per person per year by 2030.

This figure currently stands at €26, whereas in the United States the per capita annual spend on cancer research is the equivalent of €234. This ten-fold gap is unacceptable.

Better translation

There have already been encouraging developments. Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, has championed the need for a clearer strategic focus on health, calling for a stronger European Health Union.

Previous Commission presidents have rather shied away from health policy, seeing it as a national competency. Variations in survival between nations, however, suggest that this hands-off approach is not in the best interests of European citizens.

The Commission launched the EU Cancer Mission last year as part of the Horizon Europe R&D funding programme, aiming to improve the lives of 3 million cancer patients by 2030. But this is not enough. It is time for the Commission to significantly increase EU spending on cancer research, with the help of national funders and charities.

It’s not just how much you spend; it’s how you spend it. Simply increasing investment on a narrow research agenda, for example focussing on laboratory-based science and precision medicine—sometimes known as personalised medicine—that tailors care to individual variability in genes, environment and lifestyle, will not have the desired impact.

Precision medicine can improve care, but only as part of a system that translates discoveries into routine clinical practice in a timely fashion. That means recognising the need to support early diagnosis, research into health services and implementation science.

Europe is strong in laboratory-based cancer research, but far less effective at translating that research into benefits for patients. To turn discoveries into better outcomes, researchers, clinicians and policymakers need to implement the evidence across the complex mosaic of cancer care services and systems in different countries.

Continental divide

Investment needs to go where it is most needed, so it yields real value and contributes to improving survival and quality of life for European cancer patients. One aspect of this is being proportionate: lung cancer is responsible for 21 per cent of the burden caused by the disease in Europe, yet our data show it accounts for only 4 per cent of cancer research output.

Geography also matters. Our data show that western Europe is forging ahead in cancer research, with output of papers roughly doubling between 2009 and 2020. Central and Eastern Europe, however, are stagnating, despite decades within the European Research Area, with output in most of these countries rising only slightly over the same period.

We recommend increasing cancer research capacity, capability and investment in central and eastern European countries by 25 per cent by 2025. European equality in cancer care and research must be just that; research advances must benefit all citizens and patients, wherever they live.

Many of Europe’s cancer services, systems and research ecosystems were not fit for purpose, even before the pandemic. A new, radical strategic direction is needed, one that ensures the best research is implemented to improve the health and wellbeing of European citizens.

With Europe’s commitment to cancer through the Beating Cancer Plan and the Cancer Mission, there is an opportunity to be truly transformative. We can reimagine cancer research strategies to be people-centred, intelligence-driven focused on equality, not only supporting the best science and innovation, but delivering them in an affordable and equitable manner.

Mark Lawler is professor of digital health at Queen’s University Belfast. Richard Sullivan is director of the Institute of Cancer Policy at King’s College London. They are lead authors on The Lancet Oncology European Groundshot Commission on Cancer Research

A version of this article also appeared in Research Europe

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The research system needs speedy and rigorous communication channels working in tandem, says Gregory Gordon

The debate around the merits of preprints versus journal articles began long before 2020. The past three years, though, have transformed the picture, as the research community voted with its feet and showed that both methods of communication are vital for the future of research. 

Preprints—an author’s own write-up of results and analysis that have not been peer-reviewed—had long been in favour in specific fields such as physics and economics. The pandemic saw their use across disciplines increase vastly, fuelled by demand for rapid and open dissemination of research. These papers accelerated understanding of the virus, and ultimately the development of vaccines and treatments.  

But Covid-related research accounted for just a third of the growth of Elsevier’s open-access preprint server SSRN, originally known as the Social Science Research Network, during the pandemic. This reflects a growing understanding in the research community of this model’s role in the knowledge life cycle. It also reflects increasing expectations among both researchers and the public for rapid research and communication of results. 

The key benefit of preprints and early stage research is their ability to help researchers inform and support each other. When many similar projects are underway in different parts of the world, a preprint from one can help others evolve. This encourages the global collaboration needed to make potentially life-changing discoveries more quickly, not to mention the benefits that early stage research can have in keeping funders and other stakeholders involved.

While early stage research and preprint publishing have clear benefits, they can also be misused—for example, by being taken as final findings rather than ongoing research. Preprints can’t operate in isolation: for definitive results and final articles, peer review is crucial. 

There will always be work to do to bring home the difference between a snapshot of indicative results and the findings of a finished article. Preprint use is becoming more responsible, thanks to a proactive approach from the organisations and companies that operate servers. 

Additional screening

At SSRN, for example, we’ve introduced additional screening of clinical medical submissions and added cautionary language to medical preprints. We’re also exploring a badge system to provide visual distinctions aimed at helping understanding of how a preprint should be used. 

Preprints have brought an encouraging boost to public engagement with research. I see the future of scholarly publishing as the happy marriage of journal articles and early stage research, both supporting researchers and helping disseminate information.

To give an idea of how rigorous peer review is: in 2021, Elsevier journals received over 2.5 million submissions. That year, more than 600,000 papers were published across its 2,700 journals. Of those, 94 per cent had content changes during the editorial stage, 73 per cent had tables or images added, and 81 per cent had references, tables or figures changed. 

Improvements during review and editing play a vital role in the knowledge lifecycle. Rigorous editorial scrutiny makes research more reliable and trustworthy, inspiring confidence both in the academic community and among the broader public at a time when separating quality research from misinformation is ever more important. 

But while peer review’s value is understood, it can move slowly. Depending on the field and journal, it can take months for a single paper to reach publication—or rejection. 

Researchers need both rapid and rigorous communication channels, and this is why the two systems must work hand-in-hand. There is no one-size-fits-all approach, and as the world emerges from the shadows of the pandemic, it’s more important than ever to ensure we are making the knowledge lifecycle as effective as possible. 

Being able to operate between platforms can have a real benefit for researchers. For example, authors submitting to more than 800 Elsevier journals can now also upload their paper to SSRN—making their research freely and rapidly available just by checking a box when uploading their paper. Elsevier also has a range of branded preprint servers for its journals, including Cell Press and The Lancet, which give readers an early look at the papers under review.

Evolve to improve

The research community must constantly look to improve and evolve the two systems for research sharing. Giving the research community the best options possible through this process will facilitate the rapid exchange of knowledge and ideas, and produce faster, better, more diverse research that benefits everyone. 

Gregory Gordon is managing director of SSRN and Knowledge Lifecycle Management at Elsevier

This article also appeared in Research Europe

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Back page gossip from the 10 November issue of Research Europe

Payback time

Too late for Halloween, but a terrifying tidbit from our team at the Society of Research Administrators International conference in Las Vegas this month that will send shivers down the back of anyone with a major grant.

Edward Waters and Rosie Dawn Griffin, of law firm Feldesman Tucker Leifer Fidell, told the conference that when institutions or researchers are found to have made false claims about US federal grants, or to have committed fraud in relation to them, they may be required to repay the entire grant and up to three times that amount in damages. 

‘False claims’ might not be outright fraud, but could include issues such as not correctly attributing researchers’ time and effort on activities, and what Waters described as the “very common” issue of not returning rebated costs to the government. “Most of these cases are not about lying, cheating and stealing: they are about a standard under the false claims act [for] reckless disregard, gross negligence, knowing about issues and not doing anything about it,” Waters said.

Pointing fingers

They may not be as well known as the particle colliders, but Europe’s physics powerhouse, Cern, is also home to some of the biggest and best lasers in the world. And it has had to warn visiting researchers not to bring their own.

In a message last week, it pointed out that since 2019, Switzerland has had a ban on nearly all laser pointers so beloved of some speechmakers, “with the exception of Class 1 laser pointers, which are authorised for use in making presentations”.

Researchers coming to Cern with their lasers “risk prosecution under Swiss law”.

UK confusions

Europe is by now well used to the UK being a slightly unreliable partner. But the recent political situation there has reached near-farcical lows.

After the last prime minister (Liz Truss, for readers who may have lost track) was ousted, her replacement, Rishi Sunak, began reshuffling ministerial roles again last month.

Science and research minister Nusrat Ghani, only appointed in September by Truss, looked to be on her way out when ex-science minister George Freeman was brought back into government.

However, both Ghani and Freeman then said they had been appointed science minister under Sunak.

Ghani’s official biography still says she has responsibility for science and research. But Freeman is being referred to as science minister in government statements.

As Research Europe went to press, there was still no clarity over who has what job.

Have cake and eat it

Our Funding Insight service recently ran a piece online about what items a researcher, embarking on a long and winding academic career, should take with them.

Your correspondent was particularly pleased to note the importance of lemon drizzle cake, which can be shared with colleagues: “Everybody likes that…and think—that cake alone might launch a fruitful collaboration of up to six people.”

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Being true to EU values is hard, but worth doing

The EU is very clear on its values. Human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law, and human rights take pride of place in the 2007 Treaty of Lisbon, as well as in countless other European Union documents.

Only a small number of Europeans would think any of those six high-level concepts should be up for debate.

What those values mean in practice, however, is a much slipperier thing, and this is something that is causing more and more problems for researchers.

As we report on the cover, the EU is debating whether it should withhold billions of euros from Hungary over concerns that are mainly around the rule of law but also touch on the other five fundamental values.

Academic freedom is a major longstanding concern with Hungary. The exile of the respected Central Europe University from its home in Budapest is a stain on the country’s government, and it is far from the only suppression and oppression of researchers there.

Those trying to work in other nations cannot afford to be complacent about the security of their values either.

We report on concerns about academic freedom in Sweden, and earlier this year there was a warning that freedoms in Denmark were in decline.

They are not isolated examples.

Across Europe, governments—often populist, right-leaning governments—are forcing people to have difficult debates about how ‘European values’ should be understood.

Some of these debates are echoing in the research world. As our cover story details, there are very divided opinions on whether political disputes should be allowed to trigger repercussions for researchers.

For some, cutting off funding destined for nations that show they do not share the same EU values is a sensible move, one that may encourage a shift back towards recognising the six European fundamentals. For others, this is a counter-productive approach that will hurt and isolate colleagues who have little say over what their politicians do.

This discussion is being had over Hungary, but also over links between researchers in Europe and those in Russia and Belarus, which are now pariah nations due to their aggression against Ukraine.

The UK and Switzerland also face damage to research due to an apparent mismatch in the values of their politicians and those in the EU.

So far, so bleak.

But there are things that unite researchers. The need to keep probing difficult questions, to find solutions to problems that have flummoxed others, to share what they have found and give and receive constructive criticism.

Ties between researchers can build bridges between even countries at war. Europe has a long history in this regard.

There is more that unites us than divides us, or there should be.

It is not always easy to see how to apply European values to the messy, complicated place Europe is. Even when it is obvious, it is not always easy to do.

It is worth remembering, as debates get nastier, that those six values should be fundamental.

European values are, well, valuable.  

This article also appeared in Research Europe

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Structural factors currently prevent alliances reaching their potential, say Anna-Lena Claeys-Kulik and Enora Bennetot Pruvot

Transnational cooperation is a key feature of the European higher education landscape; it is also at the heart of the European Commission’s strategy for universities, in the form of the flagship policy of the alliances funded under the European Universities Initiative. Such cooperation helps to improve the quality of higher education, research and innovation and is vital for tackling societal challenges. 

But if we want universities to make the leap in transnational cooperation that the EUI aims to effect, policymakers must take their own leap in implementing reforms that work towards creating the necessary framework conditions.

Many of the issues facing the EUI come up in other forms of transnational cooperation between universities. But the multilateral context of alliances, which aim to foster collaboration across university missions as well as simply between institutions, makes these issues even more salient. Across Europe, there is a push towards wider transnational university cooperation; realising those ambitions will require a qualitative leap in how reforms are planned and implemented. 

The European University Association’s briefing on the EUI and system-level reforms, published on 19 October, illustrates how the construction of European alliances has shone a light on challenges for cross-border cooperation in general. 

These challenges come from a combination of diverging or restrictive regulatory and funding frameworks, along with differences in institutional policies and practices. They are felt in many areas, from quality assurance of joint programmes, degree structures and the use of transferable credits, the language of instruction and academic calendars, to financial and staffing autonomy, tuition fees and differences in funding structures and levels. 

Some of these challenges could be addressed by implementing already agreed policies such as the tools and instruments developed in the Bologna Process, which aims to enhance the compatibility of national higher education systems across Europe. 

An important example of this is the European Approach to Quality Assurance of Joint Programmes. This was adopted by ministers from nations in the European Higher Education Area in 2015, but so far its implementation remains highly fragmented.

In other areas, including regulations on staffing and employment, as well as funding levels, structural factors are holding back transnational collaboration. Regarding funding, it is not only a matter of improving support for transnational collaboration in isolation but of addressing the complexity of the funding landscape as a whole.

Aligned funding

There’s a pressing need for a better alignment of European, national and other funding streams to universities. Crucially, this also requires the strengthening of universities’ core funding and financial autonomy so that institutions can invest in the type of transnational cooperation that best fits their vision, profile and strategy.

If transnational collaboration is to achieve its potential as part of university strategy, it needs long-term financial sustainability. 

To fully achieve this, certain conditions must be fulfilled. These include structural support through mutually reinforcing European and national funding that allows institutions to allocate resources according to their priorities, and policymakers working towards more convergence between national systems while keeping structures and approaches sufficiently open and flexible. Solving this puzzle will be challenging but worthwhile.

The language of instruction is another topic that illustrates the complexity of internationalisation in higher education and shows that the issues are not just of a technical nature. Throughout Europe, most universities are relatively free to choose the language in which classes are delivered, but several countries place restrictions on universities’ use of foreign languages. 

In Greece and Cyprus, for example, bachelor’s degrees can only be taught in the national language. Solutions are needed that do not place an unnecessary burden on universities’ ability to run joint programmes with partners in other countries, while taking into account the concerns of smaller countries and those related to less widely spoken languages. 

It is clear that a systematic mapping of all the challenges is necessary before formulating any policy instruments relating to the EUI and wider issues of European higher education. This mapping needs to cover all university missions. It’s clear that overcoming challenges to the development of transnational cooperation must be an integral part of policy discussions on synergies between the European Education Area, the European Research Area and the European Higher Education Area. 

Anna-Lena Claeys-Kulik is deputy director for policy coordination and foresight and Enora Bennetot Pruvot is deputy director for governance, funding and public policy development, both at the European University Association

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Creative sidelines are a common, powerful and undervalued form of knowledge exchange, says Joaquín Azagra-Caro

Academic artists are found in every time and place. The archetypal example is Leonardo da Vinci, who worked in several artistic and scientific disciplines. José Echegaray, a civil engineer at the Polytechnic University of Madrid, won the 1904 Nobel Prize in Literature for his plays; and winners in other categories, such as the neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal, have written biographies or short stories. 

Two of the best-selling novelists of all time—philologist JRR Tolkien (University of Oxford) and semiotician Umberto Eco (University of Bologna)—put their scholarship into their fiction. Psychologist William Moulton Marston, who worked in private US universities, created the comic book icon Wonder Woman. 

Many Russian composers have doubled as academics—Alexander Borodin, who composed the opera Prince Igor, was a chemist at what is now the SM Kirov Military Medical Academy. 

The list of mathematicians and computer scientists who also produced visual art includes Jacobus ‘Koos’ Verhoeff, George W Hart and Helaman Ferguson. 

This is not just a question of famous names. Surveying 7,000 Spanish researchers, my colleagues and I found that more than half make art of some kind. 

For some, it is a hobby, separate from their professional lives. For most, though, their research informs their art and helps communicate it to a wider audience. One researcher studying school bullying, for example, used his work to inform a young-adult novel exploring the issue, and the police engaged with local schools through reading clubs with the author.

Professional tensions

Many researchers, however, find their artistic and academic efforts in tension. Making art is often seen as incompatible with being a productive and impactful researcher. For those early in their careers, there is a negative relationship between ‘science quality’ and artistic activity. Making art seems to take time and resources away from the all-consuming business of building an academic reputation. 

This is partly a consequence of the incentives driving academic promotion. But several researchers also complained that showing a strong commitment to art could seem weird and dilettantish to their peers. Feelings of frustration and having to keep one’s interests hidden are common among artistic researchers. This is particularly true for women, who report more barriers to combining art with research, as well as different expectations and prejudices to their male counterparts. 

Perhaps this explains why, unlike Tolkien and Eco, the American ethologist Diana Gabaldon and the Spanish philologist María Dueñas—best-selling authors, respectively of the Outlander series and the novel The Time in Between—left jobs at universities to write full time.

Seeing artistic and academic activity as incompatible is a mistake. For one thing, artistic skills may benefit research directly. The ability to write prose with clarity and imagination is an asset in many disciplines. In other domains, other skills may come into play—for example, performance for live presentations or videos, or film-making for visual ethnography.

But the links between art and research go much broader. Art improves our lives, providing catharsis, pleasure and enjoyment. It nourishes our intellectual and emotional health, and it helps places and economies to thrive. 

We should see art as another facet of broader academic activity, alongside commercialisation and more conventional knowledge exchange. Ignoring art in the scientific field risks underestimating and misunderstanding knowledge transfer. Not valuing artistically creative researchers risks disillusionment and burnout, and ultimately a brain drain.

Power differences

My colleagues and I found that the higher a person rises up the academic ladder, the easier it becomes to combine science and art; indeed, above a certain level, artistic engagement is positively associated with academic performance. This points to power differences and double standards: what’s good for the privileged is not good for outsiders. The aim should be to make artistic activity accessible at every point on the academic career ladder. 

Institutions and funders could open up artistic work to more researchers besides the elite by making funds available for such work, by giving knowledge transfer through art more weight in career evaluations, and through policymakers acknowledging research impact through art, to improve understanding of researchers’ contribution to society. Making funding proposals more about the quality of the idea at hand and less about past work would also help to give more weight to ideas than to status.

Ultimately, universities should rank art alongside their other efforts at outreach, engagement and impact. 

Joaquín Azagra-Caro is a researcher at Ingenio, a joint research institute of the Spanish National Research Council and the Polytechnic University of Valencia  

This article also appeared in Research Europe

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