Pool national research, says Potocnik

Janez Potočnik: increase the impact, says the research commissioner.

According to a recent study 85 per cent of the public sector research in Europe is programmed, financed, monitored and evaluated at national level. Cross-border collaboration accounts for just 15 per cent and most of that comes from projects paid for by the EU framework programme, the Commission said.

“National programmes are obviously necessary; however, in certain areas of strategic public interest, they can result in duplication and may lead to a shortfall in the critical mass of resources needed to make a significant impact,” research commissioner Janez Potočnik said, adding that EU countries “should increase the impact of our national investments by acting jointly”.

Earlier this month the Commission published a plan for how the national programmes can be tied together. It made clear that cooperation should remain voluntary and need not involve all Member States in each specific initiative. It could involve coordination of existing national programmes or the setting up of entirely new ones, pooling resources and collectively monitoring and reviewing progress.

Potočnik has high hopes for joint programming, arguing that it could become a mechanism at least as important as the Framework programmes in the European research landscape and change “the very way in which Europeans think about research”.

But he knows he is stepping on the toes of national governments. In a Commission-initiated consultation on the subject of joint programming published in April, national research ministries were reluctant to bind their research programmes together.

The consultation examined the issue of joint programming in the context of the Commission’s efforts to forge a European Research Area. National governments, it seems, would prefer to keep the links more casual.

Nevertheless the Commission wants to test two pilot programmes: the European Strategic Energy Technology Plan and a Marine Research Strategy to see how joint programming could work.

The Commission hopes that national governments will soon nominate representatives to select the areas of research that could benefit from joint programming. Then, by the end of this year they should sign up to the idea of joint programming, under the guidance of the French government, which is currently chairing all meetings of national ministers.

The selection of research topics should be made by mid-2009 and joint programmes should officially be launched by the end of next year, the Commission said in what appears a rather optimistic timetable.

In a separate but related plan, the Commission proposed that pan-European research organisations should be exempted from paying VAT and given additional perks to encourage them to flourish. But the proposed breaks would not be applied to existing institutions such as CERN, the Commission said.