The Myth of European Research Integration

I have spent significant time of my academic research career in Europe and during the past two decades I have participated to a number of EU-funded research projects, covering almost all possible funding schemas. Until very recently (the creation of the European Research Council), EU research policy was towards European Research Integration. The underlying principles of this policy towards getting support can be summarized as follows:

• Create a reasonably spread research consortium representing well the geographic distribution of EU members (north/south, big/small, old/new members)
• Introduce artificially some industrial connection to the consortium either by involving “research” in industry, or an industrial partner as integrator for some of the calls, which will introduce to the proposal credibility with respect to the society (well industry will transfer the technology)
• Establish connection with the research office in Brussels offices, and hire a professional company to write the proposal where the “call” buzz words appears as frequently as possible and also consider a professional company as well as to assume its coordination,

While all these conditions do make perfect sense and should have led to an efficient and productive research integration, this didn't happen and tremendous amount of resources was spent on projects with questionable return to investment . There are a number of reasons for that:

• Until recently the evaluation/review mechanisms were questionable/problematic. Researchers coming from the whole Europe used to meet a week in Brussels, gaining access to - hard copies of - the proposals the day of the review, and had to made an assessment during the day without having any means to check the credibility and the quality of the teams being involved in the proposal.
• Until recently (and even now) the programs were run from professional managers (with certainly excellent prior research experience) sitting on their positions for while and having really strong influence on the nature as well as content of proposals being funded. While it is certain that almost all of even all of them were highly capable to do so, such a system is not healthy. Same people mean creation of network which is something natural in society (both from researchers as well as from offices). Network (in particular long-standing one) is equivalent with problematic renewal both on ideas as well as on people/labs funded. Introducing at least some notion of rotation would have been beneficial.
• Until recently evaluation/follow up mechanisms were not appropriate. Reviews (either intermediate or final ones) were not done properly. It is uncertain how the selection of the reviewers is done and how they are assigned to a project but the whole process is very problematic. I recall talking to a friend who was involved with a FP7 grant involving highly visible people and end up being evaluated from one of my students (who just graduated) and another former student of one of the most visible members of the consortium. When this was pointed out to the project officer his answer was quite impressive: it is good to have fresh blood in the process...I do review grants (and spend a lot of time) for many international funding organisms (Netherlands, France, Switzerland, Germany, Israel, Canada, Belgium, Luxemburg, Honk Kong - surprisingly enough I was never involved on any EU-related proposal review or evaluation), I could state for example that the Austrian Science Foundation (among others) is doing much better job and put in place far more rigorous evaluation mechanisms.

The above issues have create a strong disconnection between the European Union funding and the European researchers. The system is far from being predictable, proposals are now prepared from professional grant writers/companies and there is a huge concentration on funding on institutions/groups per call which is neither healthy or normal. This doesn't mean that these institutions do not deserve funding, they certainly do but I am almost sure that their funding envelope is far from being proportional with respect to their contribution in their domains at the European level.

Unfortunately EU doesn't put up statistics on institutional funding. It would have been for example interesting to compare/establish correlation of that with research productivity (for example as it concerns research projects) in Europe.

The complexity, inertia and the lack of transparency of the system has led many (and some of the excellent) labs to give up on getting support for their research from the Europe which in the long run could be devastating for the European research. The European Research Council seems to be a mechanism to remediate that but these are mostly individual grants which do not offer the ability to support highly ambitious interdisciplinary efforts. It is certain that European research integration through flagships grants is necessary and important in order to be competitive at the international scale. Unfortunately, current standards and practices do not provide the best possible conditions and the inertia of the system is unbelievable.

Lets hope that the new framework (Horizon 2020) will change things and make the process more efficient, more productive and more transparent.

* I am familiar with the computer science/applied mathematics

* EU funding schemas were (and still are) quite generous as it concern my research activities