European Union seeks support for top research council

support international research collaborations across Europe, were notorious for their abundance of red tape and complicated formalities. The current instalment, FP6, runs out in December 2006. For the successor, the European Commission has now presented a draft proposal containing some radical new thinking and promising 'significant simplification of its operations compared with its predecessors'. The most conspicuous change is that the proposal contains a lot more cash than the last Framework Programme. Raising the bar from under 5 billion to just over 10 billion Euros for the five year period, the commission is clearly willing to talk serious money, even though it still offers only a fraction of what the national agencies hand out to researchers. Overall, there seems to be an agreement that it would be desirable to invest 3 per cent of gross domestic product into public research across Europe, but most countries still fall short of this goal, and even the 10 billion Euros of FP7, if they get approved by the European Parliament, will not top up research spending sufficiently to reach that magic number. High hopes: The European Commission is proposing a new research council to distribute some of its future research funds.