The ERA Chairs competition, part of efforts to widen participation in EU research, has given awards of up to €2.5M to 13 institutes in East and South Europe. But the debate on bridging the continent’s research gap goes on
Thirteen universities and technical institutes in Europe’s poorer regions are to receive up to €2.5 million each to recruit new research staff, the EU announced.
The European Research Area chairs funding is reserved for, “those parts of Europe that have not done as well as they could in research and innovation,” the Commission said. Research centres in Estonia, Croatia, Cyprus, Poland, Portugal and Romania will receive cash.
“This money allows us to double our research team,” said Nicolas Jarraud, an environmental scientist with The Cyprus Institute and one of the grant recipients. He is leading a solar power project in the south coast of Cyprus at Pentakomo.
The EU’s intention is to try and plug the major gap in research performance between the best and worst countries, as highlighted in the European Commission's 2014 Innovation Union Scoreboard.
The European Commission says that the visibility of the funding award will help poorer regions in attracting, “more high level staff as well as money from other sources, such as EU research funding or regional funds.”
“Our country can’t afford competitive research wages,” Jarraud said. “This scheme allows institutes to attract people to places they wouldn’t usually go.”
Widening participation
Member states that are eligible for the funding include all those that joined the EU after 2004, Portugal and Luxembourg, and eight of the non-EU countries associated to Horizon 2020. The competition was launched in Brussels at the end of 2013 with a budget of €33.6 million and 88 proposals were received.
The scheme is part of a greater thrust from the EU on widening participation, in which the Commission is trying to encourage more researchers from Eastern and Southern Europe to apply for research money. Other initiatives under the greater participation scheme are titled “twinning” and “teaming”.
Not everyone is happy with the idea. One researcher, speaking off the record, said the initiative’s intentions suggest a compromise on excellence criteria, and should be the “preserve of structural funding.” For 2014-20, structural funds for research total €100 billion, but richer countries, such as the UK and Germany, benefit less from them.
Breaking the duck
How did a research gap develop in Europe between institutes? “There are many responses to that question,” said Pedro Beja, a researcher with the University of Porto and one of the chair grant winners. “We have relatively small institutions; we’re not very well connected; and we don’t participate as much in the big research networks.”
Legacy counts too. “We are ex-Soviet Union; when the USSR broke up, we had almost nothing,” said Sulev Kõks, a Research Fellow of Physiological Genomics with the University of Tartu in Estonia, an institute which won two chair grants.
The brain drain to Europe’s science hot spots does not help matters. “I’d like to see more initiatives from the EU to encourage expats to come back to their countries,” said Jarraud.
While there is research money pumping from Brussels in the €80 billion Horizon 2020 programme, it is hard to break your duck and win some of it, said Beja.
“In general, Portuguese institutions are not very competitive when it comes to winning EU money,” he said.
Drop in the ocean
Competitions like chairs, twinning and teaming are a good step, but more money for smaller institutes would be nice, said Beja.
“I think there should be more investment [in widening participation],” he said. “The chair competition is a drop of water in the Horizon 2020 ocean.”
EU research funding is essential, Beja said, especially with governments tightening their belts on science budgets. The next competition for chair grants will not be until 2017.
Winning EU research contracts is, for the most part, the preserve of big institutions in western European countries, especially the UK. Four of its universities, Oxford, Cambridge, University College London and Imperial College London, were among the top five recipients of research contracts in Horizon 2020’s predecessor, the Seventh Framework Programme, which ran from 2007-13. ETH Zurich was another big recipient.
The European Research Centre (ERC) hands out grants for basic research, but is considered by many scientists as something of an exclusive club. “It’s difficult to spark the process of winning an ERC grant,” said Beja. “If we try and access it, we’re [inevitably] going to be measured against [the likes of] Oxford or Cambridge and we’re not going to win that comparison.”
Jarraud remains optimistic on the level of funding from Brussels. “There are structural funds too,” he noted. Money from the EU’s regional kitty helped pay for his institute’s solar station infrastructure. He is also complementary about the advice on offer from the Joint Research Centre, the EU’s in-house research institute which offers “Stairways to Excellence” guidelines for less-developed institutes.
Mart Loog, Professor of Molecular Systems Biology, and the University of Tartu’s second chair winner, advised that institutes should not put all their eggs in any one basket. “We need to use all the opportunities no matter how competitive the programme,” he said.
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