5 ms·

Although it has its own set of problems (some pretty large), this is one somewhat nice aspect of the EU scientific funding system. It has ulterior motives, but

by mjn 13y ago

Although it has its own set of problems (some pretty large), this is one somewhat nice aspect of the EU scientific funding system. It has ulterior motives, but many of them are "meta" motives rather than specific ones like oil-sands, because it's not one national government setting the priority. Instead there are meta-motives like "improve European research/educational integration". That's implemented by requiring that EU-level funding only go to multi-country projects with partners from >= 3 countries represented (single-country or two-country projects are supposed to be funded at the national level). That adds coordination difficulties since every EU project is a big multinational management problem, but it's at least a political criterion that's mostly orthogonal to the actual research. And when they do pick actual topics, because of the need to compromise between so many governments they tend to be very vague, like "data & 21st-century society", which you can fit a lot of things under. I do recall seeing a study that suggested that just taking the total pot of money and dividing it by the number of researchers would be at least as good and maybe better, though. Even if the lack of competition leads to less hard work and more money being spent on questionable things, there is a huge overhead removed: the entire infrastructure of people writing 100-page documents, other people reviewing those documents, people flying to Brussels (or D.C. or Ottawa) to make funding decisions, support staff at universities reviewing documents, etc., etc.

dnautics 13y ago
The odd thing about your comment is that in my experience science in Europe is a MORE feudal system than in the us, with hierarchies of professorships and less independence for most researchers. It's possible that this is a cultural thing writ large, but how exactly do you get a committee to do anything but reward the 'haves' at the expense of the 'have not's?
- mjn 13y ago
  That's one area that really, really varies, and is completely unstandardized across Europe (while the funding mechanisms and degrees are becoming more standardized, which is a tricky divergence). Germany has more of a traditional model where a Professor has a capital P, is not a social peer of the lower-down people, and there is no clear route to becoming that person. But once you are, there is a large degree of research freedom and some guaranteed funding. Sweden has the diametric opposite, where a lecturer with a masters degree who's been teaching at the same place for a few years basically becomes permanent faculty with tenure, without having to either do a PhD or go through a tenure application (and anyone with a PhD is more or less equally at the top tier). Denmark isn't quite as flat on the teaching side, but is flatter on the faculty vs. PhD student side, with PhD students considered more or less faculty, paid much better salaries than most PhD students (€40-45k), and guaranteed funding (by law) for their entire PhD before they're admitted. Italy is more feudal, with "barons" controlling the positions in some departments (apparently Umberto Eco, mostly known to the general public for his novels, is somewhat notorious in Italian academic circles for being one of the big ones). Spanish universities can be super-regional, with complex language requirements, e.g. a colleague of mine who was born and raised in Galicia can't teach at a Galician university without doing additional certifications, because his degree was not done in a Galician university. Etc. But my point was mostly just that the EU as a funding body doesn't micromanage research areas that much, because it has too many governments to do so: Denmark might want all the money in wind power, but they won't get that through. Instead the EU picks general meta-goals like "promote European research integration", and a few broad focus areas, which allows quite a bit of flexibility on what the actual scientific project is. Some blue-skies stuff gets funded as a result, as long as it's multinational blue-skies work in a broad area of interest.
pcrh 13y ago
The administrative overhead on many EU funded projects is so complex and burdensome that there is a small industry of private companies that will help you navigate it. The EU sometimes even allows specific additional budgets for this, all in the spirit of "proper management and oversight" and "accountability". The upshot is that some professors in the UK will not apply for these funds, since the work/research output ratio is too low. Contrast that to some other funding agencies that simply ask for a 4 or so page annual report of progress and a final report, which hopefully shows your publication output (if none, you probably won't get any further funds from them).
- raphman 13y ago
  I have to second this. EU-funded research projects seem to be quite inefficient in at least the few cases I know of. You need several universities and companies - distributed over as many EU countries as possible - to cooperate and communicate. This apparently works some of the time. Each university gets funding for one or two PhD students. In the cases I observed, these PhD students had to produce an enormous amount of written "deliverables" all the time. Their research project was so different from what the rest of the group was doing, that they had more or less nobody to discuss their work with. Other, nationally funded research projects have always seemed more effective and efficient to me.
  - mjn 13y ago
    There's definitely overhead, and simply choosing not to get into that game is a legitimate choice (often a good one, if other funding is available). How it's managed can make the experience differ greatly though. One of the consortium partners is supposed to be the managing partner, and if they do a good job, the scientific partners should be in much better shape. Of course, they don't always. I haven't done a deep investigation, but anecdotally the projects that have worked best for us have a managing partner that is a research institute, not a university, i.e. full-time researchers who are used to managing large projects and have substantial administrative support for doing so. For example CERTH (http://www.certh.gr/root.en.aspx http://www.certh.gr/root.en.aspx) do that kind of thing well. This is kind of analogous to doing a big DARPA project in the U.S. with a partner like BBN or SRI, who know how to handle DARPA, are staffed to do so, and can take care of the interface. I think, though this is more speculative, that it also helps if the managing partner is in southern Europe, contrary to the usual stereotype about efficiency. Mostly because costs are lower: if a managing partner in Denmark is given €200k/yr, we can hire 3-4 staff members, while the Greek managing partner we worked with hired 10 staff members on that same budget (some researchers and some secretarial). They took care of nearly all the project's paperwork as a result. I think people in bureaucratic countries are also better at navigating the EU bureaucracy quickly. The administrative staff here (Denmark) are really slow at it and in a sense take it too seriously, not realizing that Brussels paperwork is not the same as Danish paperwork. Much of it is filler, not something you should agonize over and spend a lot of time filling out (some of it is important, but you need to recognize which is which to get anything done). With this kind of arrangement, full-time staff who know how to do such things should be writing the reports, not PhD students. I'm not sure we're even allowed to have PhD students do that kind of work; it might be seen by the PhD oversight board as misusing them. Nationally funded projects are definitely lower-overhead, but there's also much less money for basic science, at least here. If you're developing smart-grid technology or wind power, there is a ton of targeted research funding. If you're doing theoretical CS, not so much. Whereas the EU explicitly has blue-skies research calls, and is currently pouring money into fairly long-term stuff like computational creativity.

by mjn 13y ago

dnautics 13y ago

The odd thing about your comment is that in my experience science in Europe is a MORE feudal system than in the us, with hierarchies of professorships and less independence for most researchers. It's possible that this is a cultural thing writ large, but how exactly do you get a committee to do anything but reward the 'haves' at the expense of the 'have not's?

mjn 13y ago
That's one area that really, really varies, and is completely unstandardized across Europe (while the funding mechanisms and degrees are becoming more standardized, which is a tricky divergence). Germany has more of a traditional model where a Professor has a capital P, is not a social peer of the lower-down people, and there is no clear route to becoming that person. But once you are, there is a large degree of research freedom and some guaranteed funding. Sweden has the diametric opposite, where a lecturer with a masters degree who's been teaching at the same place for a few years basically becomes permanent faculty with tenure, without having to either do a PhD or go through a tenure application (and anyone with a PhD is more or less equally at the top tier). Denmark isn't quite as flat on the teaching side, but is flatter on the faculty vs. PhD student side, with PhD students considered more or less faculty, paid much better salaries than most PhD students (€40-45k), and guaranteed funding (by law) for their entire PhD before they're admitted. Italy is more feudal, with "barons" controlling the positions in some departments (apparently Umberto Eco, mostly known to the general public for his novels, is somewhat notorious in Italian academic circles for being one of the big ones). Spanish universities can be super-regional, with complex language requirements, e.g. a colleague of mine who was born and raised in Galicia can't teach at a Galician university without doing additional certifications, because his degree was not done in a Galician university. Etc. But my point was mostly just that the EU as a funding body doesn't micromanage research areas that much, because it has too many governments to do so: Denmark might want all the money in wind power, but they won't get that through. Instead the EU picks general meta-goals like "promote European research integration", and a few broad focus areas, which allows quite a bit of flexibility on what the actual scientific project is. Some blue-skies stuff gets funded as a result, as long as it's multinational blue-skies work in a broad area of interest.

pcrh 13y ago

The administrative overhead on many EU funded projects is so complex and burdensome that there is a small industry of private companies that will help you navigate it. The EU sometimes even allows specific additional budgets for this, all in the spirit of "proper management and oversight" and "accountability". The upshot is that some professors in the UK will not apply for these funds, since the work/research output ratio is too low. Contrast that to some other funding agencies that simply ask for a 4 or so page annual report of progress and a final report, which hopefully shows your publication output (if none, you probably won't get any further funds from them).

raphman 13y ago
I have to second this. EU-funded research projects seem to be quite inefficient in at least the few cases I know of. You need several universities and companies - distributed over as many EU countries as possible - to cooperate and communicate. This apparently works some of the time. Each university gets funding for one or two PhD students. In the cases I observed, these PhD students had to produce an enormous amount of written "deliverables" all the time. Their research project was so different from what the rest of the group was doing, that they had more or less nobody to discuss their work with. Other, nationally funded research projects have always seemed more effective and efficient to me.
- mjn 13y ago
  There's definitely overhead, and simply choosing not to get into that game is a legitimate choice (often a good one, if other funding is available). How it's managed can make the experience differ greatly though. One of the consortium partners is supposed to be the managing partner, and if they do a good job, the scientific partners should be in much better shape. Of course, they don't always. I haven't done a deep investigation, but anecdotally the projects that have worked best for us have a managing partner that is a research institute, not a university, i.e. full-time researchers who are used to managing large projects and have substantial administrative support for doing so. For example CERTH (http://www.certh.gr/root.en.aspx http://www.certh.gr/root.en.aspx) do that kind of thing well. This is kind of analogous to doing a big DARPA project in the U.S. with a partner like BBN or SRI, who know how to handle DARPA, are staffed to do so, and can take care of the interface. I think, though this is more speculative, that it also helps if the managing partner is in southern Europe, contrary to the usual stereotype about efficiency. Mostly because costs are lower: if a managing partner in Denmark is given €200k/yr, we can hire 3-4 staff members, while the Greek managing partner we worked with hired 10 staff members on that same budget (some researchers and some secretarial). They took care of nearly all the project's paperwork as a result. I think people in bureaucratic countries are also better at navigating the EU bureaucracy quickly. The administrative staff here (Denmark) are really slow at it and in a sense take it too seriously, not realizing that Brussels paperwork is not the same as Danish paperwork. Much of it is filler, not something you should agonize over and spend a lot of time filling out (some of it is important, but you need to recognize which is which to get anything done). With this kind of arrangement, full-time staff who know how to do such things should be writing the reports, not PhD students. I'm not sure we're even allowed to have PhD students do that kind of work; it might be seen by the PhD oversight board as misusing them. Nationally funded projects are definitely lower-overhead, but there's also much less money for basic science, at least here. If you're developing smart-grid technology or wind power, there is a ton of targeted research funding. If you're doing theoretical CS, not so much. Whereas the EU explicitly has blue-skies research calls, and is currently pouring money into fairly long-term stuff like computational creativity.