Excellent research demands excellent administration

20 Jul 2011 | Viewpoint
The quality of the research it backs is not in doubt, but now the European Research Council must transform itself from “amateurish” to a polished and professional operation

The European Research Council (ERC) has had its ups and downs in the last couple of years - not in attracting and funding excellent basic research - but in terms of deciding how it should best be run in the future.

After an independent review published in July 2009 criticised the ERC’s “somewhat amateurish practices” and an over-reliance on its pioneers’ goodwill in order to compensate for “institutional, procedural and administrative deficiencies”, it was time to act and come up with solutions. And that’s exactly what a European Research Council Task Force has done, with its final report published earlier this month.

The report rightly starts out, as did the July 2009 review, by underlining the successes achieved by the ERC since it was set up in 2007. As the first pan-European funding organisation for basic research, it has driven up the quality of the overall European research system.

For example, the prestige for a university or other research organisation of hosting an ERC grantee (known as a principal investigator) has led to more competition between institutes as they seek to offer the most attractive conditions for top researchers. To quote the independent review, “Despite being a new, and thus untried instrument, the ERC has manifestly succeeded in attracting and funding world-class research and is playing an important role in anchoring research talent.”

And yet there have been serious concerns about the long-term sustainability of the ERC, which was damned with the faint praise of being a “promising but still fragile innovation”. What structure should it adopt? What would optimal operating conditions be?

Questions such as these were tackled by the ERC Task Force, whose mandate was to come up with, “a lasting legal and organisational structure”, building on the independent review’s recommendations, which included a call to streamline governance, further simplify the underlying financial and staff regulations and make those regulations compatible with the needs of frontier research.

A completely new structure?

The task force considered the possibility of a completely new structure, outside the European Commission. After weighing up the pros and cons, however, it decided rather than deal with the uncertainties and transitional difficulties of moving to a new system, it is preferable to keep the ERC within the existing Executive Agency structure.

The agency design was considered to be “reasonably well-suited” to the needs of the ERC, so the conclusion was to improve the existing system, rather than try out another one. As Ernst Ludwig Winnaker, a member of the task force and a former secretary-general of the ERC, said, “Having been part of one such transition, from a directorate to an Executive Agency, which was handled extremely unprofessionally, [it] made it easy for me to shy away from another experiment of this kind.”

Working within the existing structure, the task force suggests changing the ERC’s governance in two key ways: increasing its operational autonomy and relaxing the day-to-day supervision. “The experience gained of the ERC as an effective, well-functioning and stable operation gives confidence that more autonomy and less intensive day-to-day supervision will not lead to maladministration or reputational damage to the Commission or, ultimately, the ERC itself,” the task force writes in its report.

Disbanding the triumvirate

The structure at the top will also be simplified. The triumvirate of a President of the Scientific Council, a Secretary-General and a Director of the executive agency will no longer exist. An earlier decision to merge the roles of Secretary-General and Director into one that would be filled by “a distinguished scientist with robust administrative experience”, to be recruited as an official in Directorate-General Research and then seconded to the agency, has also been scrapped.

“This was going in the wrong direction,” said Helga Nowotny, president of the ERC, adding that the recruitment process was stopped at her and the Scientific Council’s request. “The Commission’s selection is different than in the academic and scientific world,” she noted.

Instead, the task force’s recommends a quasi-full time (which is defined as 80 per cent of full time) role for the President of the ERC. The President will chair the Scientific Council, whose role is to set the Council’s scientific and research policy.

No more ménage à trois

The post, to be assumed by Nowotny’s successor, will be based in Brussels and take effect at the start of the next seven-year financial cycle in 2014. In addition, the director of the ERC executive agency will have an enhanced role, with greater flexibility vis-a-vis the Commission. “The current situation is not satisfactory, mainly because of the existence of a ménage à trois, the Scientific Council, the Executive Agency and DG-Research,” Winnaker said. “For many reasons, in particular a dilution of responsibilities, I clearly favour a ménage à deux, [of] the Scientific Council and the Executive Agency.”

The increased role of scientists in the ERC set-up is evident in two respects. First, there is the enhanced role of the president and chair of the Scientific Council, who will have more direct authority over the work programme. As Robert-Jan Smits, director-general of the Commission’s DG Research, said, “The President will be the public face of the ERC.”

Second, in response to repeated suggestions that the steering committee should involve more scientists, the task force has suggested that it include two members from the ERC’s Scientific Council.

With the publication of its report on July 12, the ERC Task Force’s work is done. The hope now is that this period of reviews, independent panels and task forces is over, the changes (including those requiring legislative changes) will be brought about, and the ERC’s position within the upcoming ‘Horizon 2020 - the Framework Programme for Research and Innovation’ will be clear and strong.

If that is achieved, then the ERC will have the freedom it needs to pursue its mission of stimulating scientific excellence in Europe.

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