Stitching Together Cross-border Research

The nations of the European Union (EU) spent €80 billion ($100 billion) last year on public nonmilitary research and development , yet European science still seems to have a quality gap compared with the US. For example, the EU produces 33% of research papers published annually worldwide but garners only 34% of citations, compared with the US, which publishes 29% of papers but earns 41% of citations Policymakers believe that one reason for this quality shortfall is the fragmentation of research spending in Europe. According to the European Commission based in Brussels, 85% of public research funds in Europe are distributed through separate national programs run by the EU's 27 member states. Many think that the way to get more bang for their euro is to tie these national activities more closely together. Multiple attempts to unite different European research programs have failed, however. The €7 billion that the European Commission allocates for research annually through its Framework Programme is supposed to nurture cross-border collaborations but does so one project at a time. And other efforts—including the long-established European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) scheme and plans in the Framework 6 Programme (which ran from 2002 to 2006) for " integrated projects " and " networks of excellence " —tried and failed to link the national research programs together. All of these efforts have foundered on a mixture of bureaucracy, nationalism, inertia, and the reluctance of top researchers, who are able to get funding in their own countries, to get involved. " It is very difficult for member states to come together on a common basis, " concedes Enda Connolly, chief executive of Ireland's Health Research Board, which distributes €40 million annually for biomedical research in Ire-land. " They are all locked into their own programs. " In the last 2 years, however, a new fix has been proposed for the problem: " joint programming " between national research agencies. The idea is to get interested nations to band together and agree on a detailed strategy for a given research field and then pick-and-choose which elements of that strategy to collaborate on. " Joint programming is critical to the future, but it is still in gestation, " says Frank Gannon, former director of the European Molecular Biology Organization and current member of the European Research Area Board, which advises the European Commission. " From my point of view, it …