In the face of China’s rising might in science, EU Parliament calls for closer EU-US research ties

With Chinese science on a breakneck trajectory, the European Parliament is calling on the EU to boost ties with the US, or risk getting left behind.

A new briefing paper by the assembly’s research department, lays out proposals to open up research programmes, increase access to and co-funding of research infrastructure, and improve open access to research and data.

“The Europe-US axis of cooperation, although still strong, is being challenged, especially by a US-China axis the importance of which is growing steadily,” the paper says.

China, which outspends Europe on research and has more researchers than the US, saw its share of highly-cited publications increase nearly five-fold between 2000 and 2010.

To help fend off the strong Chinese challenge, several steps should be taken to boost links with the US.

First, the EU and US should pool their resources better. The paper notes that only Horizon 2020 projects in the field of health are fully open to US researchers, following an agreement signed in 2008 between the European Commission and US National Institutes for Health. Other fields should be opened too. 

There is room for greater EU-US cooperation in research infrastructures, which “remains at a low level,” according to the paper.

Apart from its participation in the forever-delayed nuclear fusion project ITER, being built in France, the US is not directly involved with the EU in the building of major research infrastructures. The US puts money into the CERN, Europe’s particle physics lab, but its role is limited to that of observer.

There is also a suggestion that the US could make a greater push to open up publicly funded scientific publications to researchers.  

While the US has the objective, laid out in the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act of 2015, to make all journals open after an embargo period of one year, the law has not yet been adopted by the Senate. In the EU meanwhile, governments have committed to free access to all scientific papers by 2020.

The paper also looks at transatlantic researcher mobility, noting that while the number of researchers traveling to work in the EU and the US and vice versa is strong, it is uneven, with a larger flow from the EU to the US.

“Promoting balanced mobility between the EU and the US, and increasing the transatlantic flows of researchers, can be seen as an important tool to strengthen EU-US cooperation in research,” the paper says. “Initiatives could be implemented to provide better information on vacant positions or on mobility schemes at national and EU level.”

On the EU side, the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions, a programmes which funds fellowships, is the main tool supporting researcher mobility under Horizon 2020. European Research Council grants are open to researchers everywhere, provided they come to carry out the work in an EU member state or associated country.