HORIZON BLOG: European R&D policy newsbytes

The European Commission has adopted the Euratom work programme for 2023-25, including plans for  €132 million in funding for projects focused on the safety of small modular reactors, the development of nuclear materials and the secure management and disposal of radioactive waste.

Most of the projects will be carried out through co-funded European partnerships. More details here.

EU commissioner for research and innovation Mariya Gabriel has visited Slovenia last week to kick off a new know-how exchange process on research and innovation policy between Ljubljana and Brussels.

Gabriel said the talks are aimed at tackling research policy challenges that Slovenia faces. Slovenian research minister Igor Papič said the new bottom-up process for research policy, the so-called enhanced dialogue on research and innovation policy, “will reinforce our efforts strengthening research and innovation in Slovenia.”

EU and Slovenian delegations met in Ljubljana last week to discuss innovation, hydrogen and green technologies and attracting research talent.

Horizon Europe will invest €429 million in 149 doctoral programmes in academia and industry, under the latest Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) call.  

The awarded programmes will train over 1,650 doctoral candidates in all fields of science, of which a third will be in engineering and ICT.  

The funding includes €47.5 million for 14 programmes aimed at training PhD candidates in industry and €43.6 million for 12 programmes that lead to joint or multiple doctoral degrees. 

In a speech at the University of Fribourg on Wednesday, European Commission vice-president Maroš Šefčovič said a fresh start in EU-Swiss relations would also include Horizon Europe association.

“Swiss association in Horizon Europe, the EU's key research and innovation funding programme of some €95.5 billion, would be a priority in the joint way forward,” Šefčovič said.

However, he warned that progress Switzerland’s participation in Horizon Europe would need to “move at the same pace on all underlying issues in our relations.”

Switzerland has been locked out of the programme due to broader political disagreements between Brussels and Bern that began unfolding in 2021 when Switzerland abandoned talks on an overarching agreement with the EU.

Germany’s audit office has found Fraunhofer, Germany’s largest applied research organisations, to have wasted large sums of its budget on luxury dinners, cars and hotels.  

The December report had initially been classified but Tagesspiegel leaked the story. On Tuesday, the auditors published the report. 

Federal research minister Bettina Stark-Watzinger reacted, saying the report “raises numerous and serious allegations” against Fraunhofer and its board.” She added that the ministry has asked Fraunhofer to improve its compliance management system. 

Here is the report in German.

Open access publishing is on the rise in France, with 67% of scientific publications published in 2021 found in open science journals as of December 2022.  

This marks a five point increase compared to the previous year and 29 points since 2028, according to the latest edition of the Open Science Barometer. And there’s progress in all fields of science: at least half of all 2021 publications are available free or charge in each discipline.  

France, much like the rest of the EU, has been pushing for more open access publishing in recent years. EU governments are currently debating a joint position on advancing open access in the EU Council of member states, to be adopted before July. 

Spain is set to trial a new science funding programme, which will provide researchers with stable funding for four years to explore their ideas, without being tied to specific projects. 

The soon-to-be-launched pilot will have a budget of €30 million and finance around 72 health research groups this year, each with around €100,000.  

The government promises the new type of non-prescriptive funding will be more flexible and less bureaucratic, and will complement project-based financing for science.  

Following the trial period, the programme is expected to grow to €700 million a year by 2033. This will cover 70% of all research groups in Spain, as the government estimates there are around 10,000 consolidated research groups in the country.  

The new programme is part of Spain's new science law, which aims to tackle precarity of research careers in the country, a growing concern in the EU.

The European Commission wants stakeholder feedback on the work of its six executive agencies, to feed into their three-year evaluation. 

For research stakeholders, the agencies in question are the Research Executive Agency (REA), which manages a large portfolio of Horizon grants, the European Research Council Executive Agency (ERCEA), and the Executive Agency for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (EISMEA), whose brief includes large parts of the European Innovation Council (EIC).  

The consultation is open until 7 April.  

The 2023 STI Outlook report on global trends in science and technology (STI) is set to be out on Thursday.  

The OECD’s flagship biennial report is a key source informing STI policy, as it tracks global patterns and their potential implications on and for national and international policies. 

This year, the focus will fall on the transformation of energy, agrifood, and mobility systems, boosting investments in low-carbon technologies, and international cooperation amid rising geopolitical tensions.  

The European Commission and the OECD will hold a public event exploring the implications of the global trends detailed in the upcoming report on Thursday afternoon. 

EU commissioner for research and innovation Mariya Gabriel is planning a series of events in San Francisco next week, as companies and tech investors are struggling to cope with the sudden collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank, one of the biggest tech lenders in the US. 

Gabriel will bring along a delegation of more than 40 representatives of the EU research and innovation community, from mayors to start-up founders and rectors for the EU Innovation Forum, and hold a roundtable on how European companies can tap into the Silicon Valley innovation pool.

She previously visited Silicon Valley in October last year to promote the EU’s new innovation agenda and to hold meetings with academics, start-up founders and venture capitalists.