The year ahead promises major political and policy developments for European R&D
People in research and higher education could be forgiven for wishing for a quiet year, after a tumultuous 2019 brought new faces to the European Commission, Parliament and Council, and all-but confirmed Brexit.
But any hopes that the next 12 months might be restfully uneventful are likely to go unfulfilled. Budget disagreements, new policies from those new faces, slowing economic growth and the ever-solidifying spectre of climate change all loom large.
The EU budget
The most important development shaping the coming decade for European researchers in 2020 is likely to be the outcome of negotiations on the EU’s next seven-year budget.
Most vital is the question of what proportion of their gross national income member states will agree to allocate for 2021-27, including how to compensate for the loss of the UK’s contribution. The impacts of these debates will only grow as they ripple outwards over time.
Without sufficient commitments, the EU won’t have the firepower to substantially slow or reverse trends that in many respects are seeing it decline into tertiary significance behind the United States and China.
The Commission has proposed 1.11 per cent of member state incomes should go to the EU. The Parliament wants 1.3 per cent, while national governments—who hold the purse strings—are thinking more like 1.07 per cent. Each hundredth of a percentage point equates to about €10bn over the seven years, making what might seem to be trivial haggling enormously important.
The total figure will trickle down into a Horizon Europe budget of €120bn in 2018 prices if the Parliament gets its way. But the R&D programme will get ‘only’ €83.5bn if the Commission wins out, and somewhere south of €83.5bn if national leaders manage to make short-term savings at the expense of long-term investment.
Other programmes of vital interest to the research world—including the cohesion budget and the Erasmus+ programme for educational mobility—could also see budget swings depending on how things shake out. But even if Horizon Europe gets its biggest budget, the money may flow in different directions to previous EU programmes.
Horizon Europe
Although the overall budget will go a long way to determining whether the programme can truly make an impact, there are likely to be surprises in store over the shares allocated to specific parts such as the European Research Council (ERC), Marie Sklodowska Curie Actions and the European Institute of Innovation and Technology.
Funding aside, rules for association of non-EU countries, including of the UK, are also yet to be decided, as are the specific new missions that are intended to increase the programme’s impact and public engagement. Horizon Europe could be the most global EU R&D programme yet, and the most visible and consequential for broader society—or not. At a more granular level, questions remain around issues including how institutions will be reimbursed for project costs incurred, such as personnel costs. Settling these issues, as well as open policy questions ranging from innovation to migration, will fall to the Council, Parliament and the new von der Leyen Commission.
Fresh-ish faces
German former defence minister Ursula von der Leyen and Italian MEP and former journalist David Sassoli became familiar figures during the second half of 2019—as the new presidents of the Commission and Parliament respectively.
More of an unknown for 2020 is Belgian former prime minister Charles Michel, who took over as president of the Council only at the start of December. How he will handle intergovernmental ructions such as the budget negotiations remains to be seen.
At the commissioner level, R&D and education commissioner Mariya Gabriel has parlayed her experience as an MEP and then digital commissioner into a quietly solid start to her new role. Even more quietly, the industry, space and defence commissioner Thierry Breton, former chief executive of IT services company Atos, has yet to give policy watchers many clues as to his management style or personal priorities.
Both have been handed substantial briefs by von der Leyen, but much will depend on the execution, and on what personal priorities the commissioners bring to their roles or develop through their early experiences in the job. Gabriel has talked in the past about wanting to tackle the brain drain of talented researchers from east to west, while Breton will no doubt have ideas about taxing digital technology companies and whether competition rules hamper EU companies globally.
Also of interest, health commissioner Stella Kyriakides has been tasked with developing a European plan to “beat” cancer, at every stage of the disease. This should link up with the Horizon Europe mission on cancer—the only one of the five proposed R&D missions that does not have a grounding in climate change.
Another important figure who remains largely an unknown quantity is Mauro Ferrari, the new president of the ERC. The nanotechnologist has spent most of his career in the United States, but now must shoulder the mantle of defending Europe’s most prestigious funder from all-too-regular attempts to hamstring its budget or dilute its focus on excellence.
Upgraded programmes
It is not just Horizon Europe that is set to launch in 2021: multiple other EU R&D schemes must be readied over the coming year. Some, such as the Digital Europe programme that will support supercomputing, artificial intelligence and other such areas, largely bring together existing EU funding modes and sources. Others, such as the European Defence Fund, are being created almost from scratch and require new rules to be agreed such as around the involvement of non-EU countries.
Here too, expect combat over budgets: under Commission proposals, the EDF would have a budget of €13bn but national governments want to slash that in half.
Open science
The next 12 months will be a crunch period for the radical open-access initiative Plan S. This is supposed to come into force in 2021, leaving only 12 months to sign up more funders, win over more researchers and publishers and, ideally, decide where financial support will be doled out.
Another development in open access that could be hugely impactful is the launch of the Commission’s own publishing platform, provisionally dubbed Open Research Europe. It has already been delayed once following criticism of the initial technical requirements, but a well-functioning, high-profile EU-run platform could be game-changing for scholarly publishing. And a flop would be a black eye for the new Commission.
The European Open Science Cloud should also start offering initial access to research data and analytics tools, leading to greater reusability and impact, if all goes to plan.
Brexit
The UK will leave the EU this year. It will enter an 11-month transition period for moving towards a new relationship, during which much will remain the same while negotiators attempt to agree and win parliamentary approval of a trade deal in a timeframe most experts consider wildly optimistic.
That deal may cover future cooperation on R&D, or a separate research-specific deal might be negotiated during the transition period. It might give the UK full access to Horizon Europe, but some parts of the programme could be reserved for EU members. Whether the UK ends up being a close neighbour or just another third country remains to be seen.
And more…
The European Space Agency is set to launch a rover to Mars to search for signs of life on the surface. The creation of the body tasked with running the Square Kilometre Array—the world’s largest radiotelescope—is due to be formalised. Europe’s particle physics lab Cern wants to secure funding for its next-generation particle accelerator, and many other big science projects will move forward.
Research Europe stands ready to guide you through all the twists and turns.
Going green
In her first full year as head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen has made tackling climate change the number one priority. Although she has also handed over to her executive vice-president Frans Timmermans much of the tricky detail of actually setting Europe firmly on course to become the first carbon-neutral continent by 2050 through a raft of policies collectively known as the European Green Deal.
Only time will tell whether the EU can truly lead the way on climate change.
And the impact the climate push will have on research is still unclear. So far the plans for the EU’s flagship Horizon Europe initiative amount to little more than retaining the existing target to spend 35 per cent of the budget on climate activities. This target has not been hit in the existing programme, Horizon 2020.
But the Commission could take the target seriously this time, and with public concern and political momentum being lifted by a Greta Thunberg-driven tide, it seems more than possible that there will be broader changes for R&D, possibly via other EU financing instruments, such as the European Investment Fund.
This article also appeared in Research Europe