The High Level Workshop on ERA offers an annual platform for Science Europe Member Organisations, national ministries, and EU institutions to discuss progress, specific aspects, and future development of the ERA.

The High Level Workshop on ERA 2014 was co-organised in Bath, UK, by Science Europe and:

• The UK Department for Business, Innovation & Skills
• Research Councils UK

The Sixth High-Level Workshop on the European Research Area provided an opportunity for research policy leaders to step back from everyday discussions and focus on overarching policy and structural issues. Participants reflected on two key and closely-linked topics:

• the role of national research organisations in ERA
• strategies related to research impact

Summary

The Science Europe President opened the workshop by presenting the SE Roadmap and perspective on ERA. He set the scene by noting how the ERA initiative is the latest of three waves of ‘Europeanisation’ of research activities that started in the 1950s: a wave that is very much about the co-ordination of policy decisions related to national research budgets. The role of national organisations therefore needs to be closely considered when working out what should be co-ordinated at European level, and to what extent. He stressed that Science Europe plays a crucial reflective role in the development of ERA, providing a platform for major national players to discuss co-ordination and collaboration needs amongst themselves and with the scientific communities, and also developing technical solutions to address these needs once they have been identified. He also emphasised Science Europe’s evidence-based approach to ERA, presenting the Science Europe-Elsevier study on collaboration and mobility patterns in Europe and the US, which led him to conclude that ERA is very much a reality.

The subsequent discussion revealed consensus on the notion that the core mission of national organisations is to support scientific excellence, which means providing their countries with the right ecosystem for science to thrive. This mission entails addressing the specific needs of the scientific system, such as diversity, redundancy, criticism, long-term view and the availability and quality of human resources. Excellence was described as a pre-condition for innovation, since disruptive innovation needs scientific breakthroughs, but science and innovation follow different logics and therefore need different policies.

The European context was also discussed, and participants highlighted both the opportunities and the threats posed by the Europeanisation of research. For many countries, ERA policy is a force for positive internal change and Europeanisation is a way to reach critical mass and to enlarge the scale of national activities. The main danger linked to the free flow of people, knowledge and resources was identified as the concentration of resources in a few locations. Countries need to retain local absorptive capacities for excellence in order to serve innovation. Universities have a specific role to play; they not only nurture scientists, but they are also locally-embedded knowledge institutions and thus can foster local development. The role of national research organisations is to build and network national capacities so that countries are prepared for Europeanisation, where this is relevant. In short, the success of ERA is dependent on having strong national systems.

The session on research impact provided an opportunity to delve deeper into the topic of the role of national organisations. All agreed that organisations supporting blue-sky research ultimately aim to benefit society. Public and political authorities have every right to engage with the question of research utility; there is work to be done, particularly at a time of constrained budgets, in making the case for science. It was noted that societal impact is not best served by trying to measure return-on-investment from individual projects, by pushing for short-termism, or by prioritising applied research. Participants showcased a range of ways to ensure that both science and public interest are served, from asking researchers to think about the issue of knowledge application when designing research projects, to focusing policy evaluation on the quality of researchers, an element which is more amenable to assessment than the societal impact of research.

The workshop also featured a discussion on an emerging topic of concern for research players: the issue of the reproducibility of scientific results, which is a specific aspect of research integrity. It can be seen that a high proportion of published material does not comply with scientific standards, in that results cannot be reproduced by others. Furthermore, the scientific system lacks consolidated management practices to handle refutations and rectifications. Ensuring and supporting scientific reproducibility is part and parcel of supporting scientific excellence. Research players around the table agreed on the urgency of addressing the issue and asked Science Europe to continue providing a platform for national research organisations to find appropriate processes to manage reproducibility.