Finance ministers don’t respond to ERC’s advances
Research chiefs meeting in Brussels to mark the fifth birthday of the European Research Council have called on national finance ministers to back research spending as part of an overall growth strategy.
Helga Nowotny, the Austrian sociologist and president of the ERC, and Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, commissioner for research and innovation, used the ERC event on 29 February and 1 March to call on finance ministers to back the Commission’s proposal for a budget of €80 billion (£67bn) for Horizon 2020.
The proposal includes a 77 per cent increase of the ERC’s budget from €7.5bn in Framework 7 to €13.3bn in Horizon 2020, which runs from 2014 to 2020. This increase is needed to maintain ERC spending at its anticipated 2013 level, since the ERC has ramped up its funding steadily throughout the Framework 7 period.
“We don’t have to convince science ministers, or the European Parliament,” Geoghegan-Quinn said at the meeting, noting that the latter body wants the budget for Horizon 2020 to be €100bn. “But we do need to convince the finance ministers of the 27 member states. They need to follow the examples of Finland, South Korea and the United States in the 1980s, when they cut everything but kept investing in research.”
But the call appeared to fall on deaf ears when finance ministers, meeting simultaneously in Brussels, asserted the need for growth, but made no specific mention of research spending. In an interview, Nowotny revealed that she’d tried to put out her own soundings directly to the finance ministers, who also met in Brussels on 1 March. “They won’t even meet me, because I enquired about it,” she said.
Nowotny said she had been “really shocked” on a visit to Singapore and New Zealand in February at the extent to which researchers and officials believed that “Europe was falling apart, with a financial crisis leading to a political crisis”.
The ERC has been widely lauded as a success, but has struggled to meet one of its objectives: the attraction of exceptionally talented researchers from Asia or the US—as returnees, or as immigrants—to take up its grants.
In a bid to rectify this Donald Dingwell, a Canadian-German volcanologist who took over as the ERC’s secretary general last September, is to undertake an extensive world tour, visiting at least 10 global research hot-spots over the next two years. Dingwell and his entourage will hold about half-a-dozen meetings with officials and researchers in each location. Dingwell says that the distinction between the ERC and older EU research programmes isn’t clearly understood. “People need to have that explained,” he says.
Dingwell’s extensive travel plans reflect the view at the ERC that the agency is now running quite smoothly, after initial years of tension between the Commission, which supervises the agency, the Scientific Council, which governs it, and the staff leadership.
Nowotny and Dingwell will each serve until the end of 2013, when both are due to be replaced by a new director-general, who is supposed to be an eminent researcher based in Brussels for at least 80 per cent of the time. Meanwhile William Cannell, the Commission official who planned and orchestrated the ERC from behind the scenes since its inception, is leaving next month to take up an academic fellowship at Imperial College London.
A note of dissent at the birthday conference came from Morten Ostergaard, research minister in Denmark, which currently holds the EU presidency. Ostergaard called for the distribution of ERC grants “to be less concentrated with regard to institutions and countries”.
But Nowotny and Geoghegan-Quinn both flatly ruled out any deviation from the ERC’s policy of selecting grantees purely on the basis of excellence. “The scientific council will not yield on this,” Nowotny said. “If we stepped back just a tiny bit, that would be the end of the ERC.”