European Research Council
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The European Research Council (ERC) is a funding body for science in the European Union. It is part of the Seventh Research Framework Programme (FP7), which succeeded FP6 in 2007. The European Research Council is similar to the United States' National Science Foundation.
On 18 July 2005, the 22 founding members of the Scientific Council for the European Research Council were announced. Currently Fotis Kafatos is the President, Helga Nowotny and Daniel Esteve are the both Vice-Presidends of the Scientific Councils.
On 27 February 2007, the ERC was launched. It has been given a budget of €7.5bn to 2013, and will focus solely on fundamental, or "blue skies", study. It is hoped the initiative can find the breakthrough thinking - and eventually new products and services - to keep the EU's economy globally competitive. The Council is envisioned as an independent, quality-driven funding body run by the scientists themselves.
Its creators expect it to stoke competition, and, by extension, drive up the quality of all scientific endeavour within Europe. "We have a collection of small scientific communities, and that means you have a tendency to select the best in small parts, rather than looking for what will survive in global competition," explains Professor Fotis Kafatos, the ERC's president. "The ERC is about pooling our efforts so that all of Europe can be a big player. We want to be the best in the world, not just the best in the local neighbourhood."
The ERC was created in response to fears that Europe would lag behind in this area, due to its spending (in relation to GDP) on scientific research being less than the USA and Japan, and only just ahead of India and China. Despite these worries, European universities perform very well in the Academic Ranking of World Universities (2008): 40% of the World's Top-500 universities are located in Europe (n=210), 40% (n=190) in the Americas and 20% (n=100) in the Asian/Pacific region.[1] However, looking at the World's Top-25 universities, universities in the United States (18 out of 25) outperform European universities.[2]
Earlier in 2007 a call for submission of research proposals was announced. The programme begun with the ERC Starting Grants (ERC-StG) scheme intended to award up to 2 million Euro for up to five years to independent researchers with no more than nine years of postdoctoral experience. For the evaluation in Stage 1, 9167 proposals were submitted, of which a mere 559 (6%) were selected to advance to a Stage 2. It is expected that around 300 grants will finally be awarded, representing just under 3% overall success rate. Ad Lagendijk decries this success rate as immorally low.[3]
In November, the ERC Scientific Council has published the results of the first ERC Advanced grants. Of the total 2167 proposals sumbitted to the first call, 275 grantees were selected in the three spheres of Science and Technology: Physical Sciences and Engineering, Life Sciences and Humanities. All the rest went as the Interdisciplinary Research.
The first results show that the shortcomings typical for the Framework Programmes for Research and Technological Development extend to the Ideas programe as well: staff maladministration, arbitrary decisions on eligibility and funding, low peer reviewing, the last comes from the hard scheme of Science and Engineering used by ERC, which is missing the converging and emerging sciences and technologies and setting up the panels of experts only with narrow expertise. Among the interdisciplinary research happened such completely unfitting projects as "Reconstructing Ancient (Biblical) Israel" or "Evolution of Development in Plants". The first ERC advanced grants, mostly distributed among academics from national universities, showed a fateful fault of mixing educational institutions with research institutions, thus leaving aside progressive research companies and so original ideas and avant-garde research projects. However, even with those shortcomings, the first ERC call has been widely considered a great success, and several changes have been introduced to the second call to make the process of grant-reviewing more transparent.
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[edit] Notes
- ^ What makes a Top University?
- ^ World’s Top-25 universities are mainly located in the United States
- ^ Lagendijk, Ad (24 July 2008), "Immoral funding rates", Survival Blog for Scientists, http://www.sciencesurvivalblog.com/ethics/immoral-funding-rates_99.
[edit] References
- BBC News story of ERC launch - Feb 2007
- Webpage of the Scientific Council of the European Research Council
- EU press release IP/05/956, Scientific Council of the European Research Council announced, released 18 July 2005.
- CORDIS - FP7 (Ideas)
[edit] See also
- Lisbon Strategy
- Framework Programmes for Research and Technological Development
- European Institute of Technology (EIT)
- European Research Area (ERA)
- Directorate-General for Research
- Directorate-General of the Joint Research Centre (European Commission)
- European Research Advisory Board (EURAB)
- European Council of Applied Sciences and Engineering (Euro-CASE)
- Information Society Technologies Advisory Group (ISTAG)
