Top universities condemn Green Paper's “lack of vision”

LERU’s Boulton: questions the need for far-reaching European-level coordination.

In its own paper LERU says there are three basic issues the Green Paper should have critically analysed to develop a long term vision for building a successful European research ecology: 1) the particular role of European vis-à-vis national and regional funding; 2) the research model for Europe, the nature of collaboration and the roles of institutions; and 3) the key processes that should be priorities for a European-level strategy.

“A truly visionary document would have analysed and questioned the prior assumptions on which current policy and practice are based. Unfortunately the Green Paper didn’t achieve that,” says LERU.

A European Research Area could be a powerful stimulus for European research and its application, but only if two conditions are fulfilled. Firstly, the benefits to individual member states must be made clear. Secondly, EU-level initiatives must be planned and implemented in ways that demonstrate how they can add value to the European research effort.

Stimulate the market

So how can such an “ecology” in which the European, national and local processes interact optimally develop in Europe? LERU argues that the European level should focus on stimulating a common market for research.

For example, the organisation strongly supports the way the Commission has set about increasing the competitiveness of basic research in Europe through the European Research Council. Other important priorities for the future should be to promote and support more researcher mobility and to simplify the regulatory and IP environments. “In addition, it is vital to exploit the scale of the European economy by coordinating the provision of major, expensive infrastructure and facilities,” LERU says.

LERU questions the need for far reaching European-level coordination of national and regional activities, programmes and activities. Geoffrey Boulton, Vice-Principal at the University of Edinburgh and Chair of the LERU Research Policy Committee explains, “Such a development would make articulation with the diversity of national and regional policies difficult, clumsy and ineffectual. It would also tend to stifle bottom-up initiatives.”

LERU is also sceptical about the EU’s penchant for networks. Networking between groups with complementary interests is ubiquitous in the world of research, but collaboration must be dynamic and flexible.

Successful research networks have the ability to reconfigure their activities and engage diverse disciplines in response to changing needs, and they exist only as long as they are creative and effective. “It would be a mistake to go towards a situation where European networks are subject to stronger central management or where the component groups become too disconnected from their parent institutions,” says David Livesey, Secretary-General of LERU.