International participation is vital for healthy R&D
Research commissioner Carlos Moedas is wise to select rendering Horizon 2020 ‘open to the world’ as a top priority. But a meeting in Brussels earlier this month highlighted how tricky it will be to deliver.
Involvement of nations that are not full or associate members of Horizon 2020 has fallen off since Framework 7. This is partly because of changes made in 2012 that ended automatic EU funding for partners from middle-income countries, such as India, China and Brazil.
The changes were necessary and appropriate: it would be wrong for the EU to continue unconditional development aid for researchers in countries whose governments are spending billions of euros on sophisticated research programmes of their own.
But one consequence has been a sharp dip in overall Horizon 2020 participation by non-member countries—now 2.4 per cent, down from almost 5 per cent under Framework 7. The drop highlights various obstacles that can discourage suitable non-EU partners from participating in Horizon 2020.
Those who take part do so under a range of bilateral agreements. American health researchers, for example, are able to apply directly for Horizon 2020 funding, under a reciprocal deal that also allows EU researchers access to the programmes of the National Institutes of Health.
In China, participants in Horizon 2020 projects can apply for support from a pot of money set aside by Beijing. That means, however, that support for the Chinese partner is reviewed separately from that of the Horizon 2020 project itself, so the latter has to be planned in a way that allows it to proceed with or without Chinese involvement.
Similar arrangements will be drawn up between the EU and every major scientific nation in the world. They have to be, because the best projects need the right partners, wherever in the world they work. Unfortunately, none of these bilateral arrangements is quite optimal. If policymakers accept the long-term desirability of genuine international collaboration, without restraint, they need to go to the next level: ‘joint programming’.
Joint programming means that nations, or entities such as the EU, co-design research programmes, to meet mutually agreed needs, and then take joint responsibility for evaluating proposals and funding projects. For researchers, that is the optimal arrangement, and it has to be the long-term aim if, as we hope and expect, research continues to move in the direction of deeper global collaboration.
From a political point of view, however, joint programming is a problem. This can be seen in the continuing difficulties encountered in implementing it, even between EU member states through such exercises as the Joint Programme on Neurodegenerative Disease. Joint programmes have suffered from the desire of every participating nation to be heard in decision-making, regardless of size or capability, and from the difficulties in securing long-term commitment from each participant.
These trials are important, because such arrangements are bound to grow in importance in the future. In the meantime, researchers will continue to muddle through as best they can, negotiating considerable hurdles on the path to seamless international collaboration.
This article also appeared in Research Europe