High hopes among European researchers are turning to worry as political battles threaten to scuttle a planned budget boost and mar the launch of the long-sought European Research Council (ERC). In April, the European Commission proposed a doubling of the E.U.’s research budget, to €70 billion ($86 billion) between 2007 and 2013 (Science, 15 April, p. 342).
The plan included €12 billion for a new ERC, which would fund basic research across Europe. But political tussles over member countries’ contributions are threatening to shrink the whole of the commission’s proposed €1.03 trillion budget by at least €150 billion. In a proposal put forward on 28 May, Luxembourg’s Prime Minister Jean- Claude Juncker, whose country currently holds the E.U. presidency, said the main cuts would come from research programs as well as “structural funds,” which build roads and other infrastructure.
“It’s very serious,” says Helga Nowotny of the Science Center Vienna, who is head of the European Research Advisory Board. Although ERC would still go forward even without the doubling, Nowotny says, a severely reduced budget will diminish its impact. Nowotny and her colleagues sent a letter on 6 June to more than 100 scientific and industrial leaders to lobby their governments to fund the full research proposal.
The letter urges recipients to point out “the contradiction between what governments say in favor of research and how they act.” E.U. Commissioner for Research Janez Potocnik says the financial decisions will be a “moment of truth for the E.U.” Potocnik was in Berlin on 2 June to try to persuade German leaders—some of the main holdouts in the budget battles—of the importance of research in the E.U.
He told Science that European politicians say repeatedly that research and innovation should be the highest priority. But protecting subsidies and capping national contributions “turn out to have slightly higher priority.” Some researchers are also concerned about an initial plan for the ERC circulated among the heads of European research councils at a meeting last month in Reykjavik, Iceland, says Ernst-Ludwig Winnacker, head of the German Research Foundation, the DFG.
The plan seems to shift power away from a council of independent scientists to the staff of an “executive agency” who answer to the European Commission. Potocnik, however, says the worries are misplaced. All issues of substance, he says “will be decided by the scientific council. The commission will sign off ” on the council’s decisions. “It’s a matter of trust,” Nowotny adds. “Legally it is not possible to give €1 billion to a group of people who have not been elected or even appointed.
It must be the commission who takes the ultimate responsibility. But the commissioner has always said he will be the guarantor for the autonomy of the ERC.” European scientists will be sure to remind him to keep his word.-GRETCHENVOGEL
Excerpt from www.sciencemag.org