Exclusive: ‘Research passport’ on the way from Brussels

Research Director-General Silva: making it easier for researchers to move from country to country.

In an interview with Science|Business, Silva said that Commission staff are preparing a communication for spring to propose measures to increase researcher mobility – to make it easier for researchers to move from country to country. For instance, he said, one proposal the Commission staff is working on is for “a European passport for researchers”.

At present, a non-EU researcher who gets invited to a lab in, say, France has difficulty getting the necessary work permits to transfer to a lab in Germany or Britain – a frequent source of complaint by European university administrators trying to coordinate international research projects.

The research mobility ideas will be among the first concrete proposals to emerge from a public consultation process launched in April 2007 by Silva’s boss, Science and Research Commissioner Janez Potočnik, to improve what the Commission calls the European Research Area.

The overall aim is to make it easier for researchers and ideas to trade across the EU, and improve coordination of European research programmes – but there’s considerable resistance among some EU countries to any action that smacks of yielding more powers to Brussels.

Watching the sensitivities

Taking note of the political sensitivities, Silva said the Commission’s aim is “to give some added value at the European level based on coordination – not based on a transfer of competences” from the EU member-states to Brussels. “We will try to make two and two equal more than four.”

In that vein, Silva said, another Commission communication is planned for Autumn 2008 on enhancing EU-wide cooperation on international research.

While declining to provide specifics on work in progress inside the Commission, he cited as a possible example the EU-wide coordination of publicity of individual national programmes for researcher and student grants, so it is easier for international researchers to see collaboration opportunities available across the EU. He noted that some of the EU’s smaller countries, lacking “critical mass” on their own, might welcome an expanded EU role in international research coordination.

He added that the Commission is forging ahead with efforts to coordinate some of its own research programmes with those of China, India, Russia and Brazil, among others. In 2008–9, he said, he expects to see the EU and selected non-EU countries launching “coordinated calls” for research projects, with joint funding. With Brazil, he said, it may well involve biofuels; with India, probably new materials; and with China, traditional medicines. Commission officials have said repeatedly that the rapid growth of science and technology investment in China and India, in particular, are important developments with which the EU must engage – or risk being overtaken as a technology powerhouse.

Keep it simple

Another key initiative for 2008, Silva said, is overhauling the way the Commission handles the administration of its R&D programmes. Complaints about paperwork, progress-reporting requirements, and financial controls of EU research programmes are rife in European academia. Silva said the Commission has already improved matters by, for instance, allowing a one-step registration process for all EU R&D programmes rather than requiring separate registrations for each programme – but he acknowledged that a common message he hears from academics is: “Simplification, simplification, simplification.”

To improve matters, he said, the Commission plans greater “externalization” of the administration of the commission’s flagship, Framework 7, R&D programme. Where appropriate, he said, Brussels wants to push the administration of individual grant programmes into separate agencies, and leave the primary policy-setting function in-house in Brussels. Silva himself is an expert in such administrative matters, having been previously in charge of the EU’s largest programme, the Common Agricultural Policy, as Director-General for Agriculture and Rural Development from 1999 to 2005.

For instance, he noted, the Commission on 14 December announced the creation of two new executive agencies for research. One, called the European Research Council Executive Agency, will manage grants awarded by the Commission’s latest basic-science funding programme, the ERC. It will have up to 389 personnel and an administrative budget of €231 million over the next six years, to manage €7 billion in total grants. The second, called the Research Executive Agency, will have up to 558 workers and an administrative budget of €252 million over six years to manage €6.5 billion in funding for, among other things, the Marie Curie fellowship programme, small-business participation in Framework 7, and a central register of all Framework programme participants.

The overall effect will be to increase by nearly 1,000 the number of people handling EU R&D grant applications – but in separate, quasi-independent agencies rather than in the central Commission administration. The agencies’ creation is to manage a 63 per cent jump in EU R&D funding that the ruling Council and European Parliament approved in late 2006.