EU ‘lagging behind’ on new approaches to research funding

EU countries and the European Commission aren’t experimenting enough with new ways to fund research, according to a member of the expert group advising the Commission on how to design the next Framework Programme.

“EU countries are lagging behind somewhat in adopting or understanding or applying novel approaches to science funding,” said Sylvia Schwaag Serger, president of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Science, at a conference in London this week on the study of science, known as metascience. 

The conference attracted close to 1,000 delegates from 62 countries to discuss various ways of reforming research, from experimenting with lotteries to distribute funding, to entirely new types of research organisation. At the event, hosted by University College London, the UK celebrated the one-year anniversary of a dedicated, government-funded Metascience Unit. 

But Serger, part of the team assembled by former Portuguese science minister Manuel Heitor to advise the Commission, told delegates that EU interest in these kinds of ideas was relatively weak. 

“I don't think you would fill a room like this in many other places in the world,” she said, referring to strong interest in metascience in the UK. “Perhaps in China, [but] not in many of the European countries I've been working in,” she added. 

As part of the Heitor report, Serger and her colleagues drew up a list of the most interesting funding experiments worldwide. But “almost none of them” involved national EU funding agencies or the Commission, she told the conference. 

To be sure, there is some EU interest in the metascience agenda, with delegates from Germany and the Netherlands particularly well represented at the conference, according to figures from the organisers. 

Germany’s private Volkswagen Foundation, for example, has also taken a lead in experimenting with funding lotteries and distributed peer review, where grant applicants review each other’s proposals, and presented its findings to the conference. 

The conference also heard from Maria Leptin, president of the European Research Council, which alongside the European Innovation Council can be counted as EU attempts to fund research and innovation differently. However, only three Commission officials were present at the conference. 

Serger thinks weaker EU interest in metascience might be due to the greater preponderance of state research funding, which makes it harder to toy with new methods of funding. 

“That might explain one of the reasons that it might be more risk averse and also more bureaucratic,” she said. 

Serger said that EU governments put lots of effort into identifying “lofty goals” for research and innovation and then “just throwing money at it,” but were strangely “non curious” about how research was actually funded and incentivised. 

Experimental unit

To spur more EU experimentation with research funding, the Heitor report told the Commission to “immediately” establish a new “experiment unit” to try “new programmes, evaluation procedures and instruments.” 

So far, the Commission hasn’t done so, although its proposal for FP10, due out later this month, will confirm whether such a unit might be a part of the next Framework Programme. 

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At the conference, the UK marked one year of its own Metascience Unit, which has so far funded 23 projects, looking at everything from the effectiveness of scientific prizes to whether academics are making their data openly available. It’s this kind of unit Serger would like to see the Commission establish. 

“It's the first unit in the world set up inside government to scrutinise, prod, experiment, challenge our own research and development efforts,” Patrick Vallance, the UK’s science minister, told the conference. 

“Are we allocating funding in the right way?” he asked. “Are our institutions actually set up to maximise the creativity and productivity of talented researchers?” 

The unit has already run a study on distributed peer review, where grant applicants review each other, and found it cut decision-making time by three months.

John-Arne Røttingen, chief executive of the Wellcome Trust, also made a grab bag of announcements to support metascience, including £2.9 million to index grants in the open access OpenAlex bibliometric database. 

He also said Wellcome would again this year trial a partial lottery system when giving out its accelerator awards, and wanted to test and measure other new ways to distribute money. 

“In the past, funders maybe took it for granted that money in at one end of the process would inevitably lead to good things emerging at the other end, and we weren't so good at checking whether that was really the case,” he said. 

Weaponisation

However, some in the metascience community at the conference voiced fears that their longstanding concerns about the research process, be it the reproducibility of results or the effectiveness of funding to back groundbreaking work, might be used by hostile politicians to justify cuts. 

This already appears to be happening in the US. Michael Kratsios, the new director of the US Office of Science and Technology Policy, warned in a speech in May that increased spending on research since the 1980s had not led to more discovery. 

“Spending more money on the wrong things is far worse than spending less money on the right things,” he argued. The White House has proposed huge cuts to funders such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.

Magdalena Skipper, editor-in-chief of Nature, told delegates it was important to think about how “exploring those inadequacies can be weaponized by others.”

Academics were sometimes “too emotional” in describing the flaws in the research process, she said, and “not systematic and methodological enough about exploring what drives those behaviours.”