UK research councils look to go international

Justifying plans to spend UK taxpayers' money on foreign researchers and allow UK scientists to take their grants abroad, the umbrella body Research Councils UK says British Science can only thrive if it engages with the best minds, organisations and facilities, wherever they are found, adding, “much world class research for the public good can only be achieved through global collaboration.”

UK scientists have a track record of working across borders. About 35 percent of 700,000 catalogued research articles published by UK-based researchers over the last 10 years have a co-author from another country. Almost half of all PhD students and around 40 percent of all researchers in the UK are non- UK citizens.

Collaborators and competitors

Collaborators and competitors are no longer confined to the obvious, developed nations, with 30 countries represented in league tables of the top 200 universities.

In particular, research spending in China and India has grown rapidly, with China’s share of scientific papers increasing from 2 percent in 1996 to six percent in 2005.

“The new globalised research community provides new challenges,” says RCUK promising to “foster the development of partnerships between research groups in the UK and overseas centres of excellence”.

The strategy has five aims: Encourage collaboration between UK researchers and the best researchers from around the world; Promote the movement of researchers to and from the UK; Give UK researchers access to data, facilities and resources; Influence the international research agenda; Promote the UK as a world centre for research and innovation.

RCUK will remove obstacles to collaboration by signing memoranda of understanding with research funders in other countries, allowing for joint funding, joint publication and networking.

Progress

There has been some progress on this front already: in 2006, UK research councils had 35 agreements with US funding agencies, 30 with Chinese organisations and smaller numbers with other key funders in Japan, Germany, India, France, Korea and Canada.

In the past, a barrier to collaborative international funding has been “double jeopardy”, the risk that a proposed joint project will be approved in one country but not in another. RCUK says it will simplify decisionmaking and ensure that projects are assessed under a single peer review system when they are funded by more than one organisation.

The RCUK also pledged allegiance to the aims of the European Research Area (ERA),  the EU’s Framework Programme 7 and the European Research Council. It anticipates that ERA-NETs, the participative research networks, which are a central feature of the emerging European Research Area, will have a significant impact on research collaborations with  European partners. UK research councils are currently involved in more than 20 ERA-NETs.

The Research Councils’ UK Research Office (UKRO), established in 1984 provides information and advice service on EU funding for research and higher education, and RCUK plans to open counterparts in China, the US and India.

The new office in China will build on successful existing collaborations. For example, the Medical Research Council has initiated visits to south-east Asia to develop the potential for collaborative research into avian flu and other emerging (and re-emerging) infections. This builds on MRC’s work with Chinese scientists in 2003 to investigate the immune system’s response to the SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) virus.

RCUK supports efforts within Europe to improve the transferability of skills, training, conditions and career progression of early career researchers. It has contributed to developments in the doctoral system in Europe and a recent gap analysis of the European Charter for Researchers and Code of Conduct for the Recruitment of Researchers demonstrated that in most cases the UK already meets the requirements of the European Charter and Code.

The research councils support the “money follows researcher” initiative and will allow UK funded academics moving within Europe to take certain research grant funding with them when they move, promoting researcher mobility in Europe.