A ‘5th Freedom’ for researchers

The European Commission launched a grass-roots political campaign to push for better planning, more money and greater flexibility in scientific research.

“Today we are starting a debate” on the future of European Union research policy, said EU Science and Research Commissioner Janez Potočnik, at a Brussels news conference. The aim, he said, is to make knowledge the “fifth freedom” of the EU – along with what is, in Brussels-speak, the four existing freedoms in EU treaties for cross-border movement of goods, services, capital and people.

The Commission voted Wednesday to publish a “Green Paper” soliciting public comment on a wide range of proposals, including greater coordination of national research budgets across the EU, new pension and career tracks so scientists can move more easily from lab to lab, and more funding for pan-European “big science” projects. The commission plans to accept public comment through August, and then fashion a set of specific proposals for action in 2008. The intent, Potočnik said, isn’t to centralize European research funding and policy in Brussels – but to better coordinate it across the EU so that the bloc can improve its competitiveness in global technology markets.

Back to the grass roots

The whole exercise is a political effort to build grass-roots support among academics and businesses for major change in the way research in Europe is managed and funded. The commission has already tried before to push through many of the ideas discussed in the Green Paper – but each time it hit obstacles.

The most common opponents have been local universities afraid of losing grants if more budget control passed to Brussels, and local politicians reluctant to yield control over a handy tool of pork-barrel politics. A result, according to the Commission: Research is duplicated in dozens of uncoordinated national programmes for nanotechnology, biomedical and other politically popular scientific fields, wasting money and effort.

But the Commission is betting that the political climate is changing – and its campaign this year is intended to build broader support in the research community for EU coordination.

Working in its favour is a mounting political distress over the EU’s position in world research and technology – reflected in Brussels last November winning approval for its biggest-ever research budget, a €54 billion, seven-year package for R&D and technological development grants under Framework Programme 7 and the Euratom programme.

The political stars are also aligned temporarily: the Portuguese government, which takes over the EU’s rotating presidency on 1 July, has vowed to make competitiveness a key issue on its policy agenda. Then, in the first half of 2008, when Potočnik plans to launch specific proposals, his native Slovenia will be at the EU helm.  

The mother of all debates

All of this talking will feed into the mother of all debates, starting in late 2008: a planned re-evaluation of the entire EU budget and how it’s set. Among the key issues: Should more EU regional-development funds – or, political heresy, agricultural subsidies – be earmarked for science and technology?

Commission economists have long argued that the EU should be doubling up its investment in the “knowledge economy”, rather than continuing to subsidize old industries. They argue that the intensity of EU research investment continues to lag behind the US and Japan, and that a technologically dynamic China will catch up with the EU as early as 2009. Results include a widening technological balance-of-payments gap, a declining share of citations to EU research in the global scientific literature, a drop in Nobel Prizes in Europe, a continuing “brain drain” of European scientific talent to greener climes, slower growth in technology-related productivity, and much more.

Still, the Commission faces an uphill slog, because much national prestige and political influence are vested in national R&D budgets. To reach out to the broadest possible audience, the Green Paper deliberately avoids pre-judging any of the scores of questions it raises about research policy. And its “fifth freedom” slogan is an attempt to translate an otherwise-dry discussion into something with more emotional appeal to the average university or industrial researcher. But Potočnik acknowledged that some Commission colleagues had questioned his tactics – for instance, in not immediately declaring which specific proposals he prefers.

“It’s not our intention that we should give the answers” yet about how EU research policy should evolve, Potočnik said. “I think it’s fair we conduct an open discussion” first.

The Brussels v. Capitals debate in research dates back to at least the 1970s. But it began gathering steam in 2000, when as part of its “Lisbon Agenda” to make Europe more competitive, the EU adopted as a policy goal the creation of a European Research Area – to create “the free circulation of researchers, ideas and technology” throughout the EU, according to a 111-page Commission staff paper presenting background on the initiative.

Slogans and reality

Like the Lisbon Agenda itself, however, precious little was actually done to make the slogan a reality. Though the central EU research budget was increased, there has been only “marginal” coordination of national research programmes – just 0.8 per cent of spending, the Commission estimates. And little change has happened in academic tenure rules, researchers’ pension schemes, or other bureaucratic details that differ from country to country and make it financial suicide to more from, say, a lab in France to one in Britain.

Researcher mobility was flagged in Potočnik’s briefing as among the biggest issues for consideration – movement, not only from country to country, but also between academia and industry.  “We want researchers to work wherever they want in the EU, free from fear their career will be penalised if they move,” Potočnik said.

Besides pension and tenure rules, the staff paper notes, “the central issue remains employers’ tendencies to recruit and promote researchers from their local environment without open and transparent procedures.”  The report continues:

“Human resources in science and technology (S&T) are a key strength of Europe, where more S&T PhDs are produced than in the US. But, as Europe crucially lacks an open, competitive and attractive labour market for researchers, the exploitation of this strength is sub-optimal and Europe instead suffers from wasted resources: some bright researchers and S&T graduates leave, others do not enter a research career in Europe or exit early, others miss opportunities to move into positions where their capacities could be better used and developed.”