‘Good progress’ at half way point in UK’s science plan

The fifth annual report on the framework, published this week, covers progress in six broad areas and reviews specific progress in implementing the plan over the past year.

At the halfway stage, the report says overall progress has been good. Rising public investment has helped maintain the position of UK research second as only to the US in world rankings.

Knowledge transfer activity is on an upward trend, and there has been good progress in attainment levels and take-up for science, technology, engineering and mathematics subjects, says the report. There has been less success in increasing the UK’s investment in R&D as an overall percentage of GDP and this remains a key challenge.

According to the report, UK researchers remain among the most efficient and productive in the world, and are second only to the US in terms of citations and highly cited papers. There is no room for complacency however, urges the report, as China has now overtaken the UK in terms of total publication output, though as yet, it has a 6 per cent world share of citations compared to the UK’s 12 per cent.

In 2008 the Research Assessment Exercise showed that 17 per cent of the research carried out by the UK was classed as being of world quality and 37 per cent internationally excellent.

Government spending on science will be nearly £6 billion per annum by 2011.

The plan to move to full economic costing for research in universities has come to fruition and a review published earlier this year says this is having a positive impact on sustainability.

The research base continues to respond to incentives to increase the economic impact of publicly-funded research, says the report. Evidence of increases are highlighted which show continued growth against a range of measures including an increase in Higher Education Institutions creating spin-out companies. The Research Councils are also driving up the economic impact of the research they fund.

There has been increased business investment and engagement with industrial expenditure on Research and Development growing in real terms from £15 billion in 2006 to £16.1 billion in 2007, the latest year for which figures are available. However, it continues to remain relatively static as a percentage of GDP at 1.1 per cent and the report says increasing this remains one of the most difficult challenges of the ten-year framework.