cross-posted from: mander.xyz/post/54926095
Europe has launched new €7 million (£6 million) grants at a time when increased political oversight of research in the US is pushing more scholars to consider leaving the country, but experts say the scheme is not big enough to seriously move the dial on international mobility.
The European Research Council (ERC) has opened applications for its prestigious ERC Plus Grants, which will offer up to €7 million over seven years to support ambitious research projects at European institutions. Researchers around the world can apply.
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When applications for the ERC Plus Grants opened, the research council highlighted that it had seen a sharp rise in the number of US-based researchers making bids for its other grants.
While Jennifer Jones [director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists in the US] said that the ERC’s seven-year grants would be attractive to many researchers, she stressed that stability was an even bigger draw than the money itself.
“That stability and that lack of fear is what is really missing right now in the US science and research community,” she said. “It signals an opportunity to be somewhere that has a long eye and values science and creates stability.”
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But those who study research mobility question whether the 30 grants on offer are enough to truly capitalise on increased interest from US-based scholars and attract enough foreign talent to boost the continent’s competitiveness.
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Marco Seeber, a professor at the University of Agder in Norway whose research focuses on higher education, said the scheme had symbolic value but there was a wider need to address structural barriers that researchers face in Europe … “You’re putting a lot of resources into a black box that you don’t know if it works,” he said. “In order to nurture a research system that’s really working and attractive, there should be structural changes, which are difficult to implement but can have long-term effects compared with just launching another funding initiative.”
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As Nature reported,
Europe’s major weakness is its ‘innovation paradox’: cutting-edge research is much less likely to be commercialized at the same scale as that in the United States and China. One factor is a dearth of R&D funding from European companies. Only two European firms — the German car maker Volkswagen, and the Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche — are among the top ten global companies for R&D investment.
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The EU has a long-term goal of achieving a seamless European Research Area (ERA) that aims to improve conditions for researchers and help them to navigate careers that cross European borders. The European Commission is set to propose an ERA Act this year, which needs member-state support for legislation to be finalized before the EU’s current seven-year financial cycle ends in 2027.
The European Commission has proposed a close to 50% real-terms increase in the next cycle of research funding in 2028–34, to €175 billion. And a nearly €900-million Choose Europe initiative was launched last year. Much of that money is going towards making European Research Council grants more appealing to researchers, and towards attracting top talent to institutions in under-performing EU regions.
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Europe is an under-appreciated research powerhouse, as the linked Nature report says.
Either it or the EU takes first or second spot in the world on several indicators, including the volume of publications, research impact and numbers of PhD graduates. And whereas the United States and China are increasingly decoupling from each other in research, the EU is maintaining or building its collaborations with both, with all three rapidly growing their links with low- and middle-income countries.
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