Pavel Exner, Vice President of the ERC and Vice Chair of its Scientific Council opened proceedings before EURECIA’s project lead, Maria Nedeva recapped our aims and objectives. Maria also summarised the novel methodology development and testing work we’ve undertaken over the past three years and our role to prepare the ground for studying better the impact of the ERC and its funding schemes.

Photo: Pavel Exner (left); Maria Nedeva (right)

Myself, Grit Laudel and Jochen Glaser then presented the approaches and findings of our parts of the research, on the impact of the ERC and its funding schemes for researchers, research content and researcher careers.

Photo: Grit Laudel (middle); Jochen Glaser (right); also pictured, Merle Jacob (left)

This was followed by a panel discussion on the theme of research, researchers and careers, chaired by Merle Jacob (Lund University) and with thought-provoking presentations from our advisory committee member Connie Chang, Stefan Hornborstel (of iFQ) and Dorothea Sturn (of FWF).

Photo: (L to R) Dorothea Sturn, Connie Chang, Merle Jacob (chair), Stefan Hornborstel

Lunch then provided a quick opportunity to take a few pictures of the facilities and view:

Photo: A patchwork of the panoramic view from the Final Workshop venue

Following lunch Jakob Edler and Michael Stampfer presented their work on the impact of the ERC on universities and research institutes.

Photo: (middle) Michael Stampfer; (right) Jakob Edler; also pictured, Nikos Kastrinos (left)

The themes of this presentation were taken up in the second panel discussion of the day, on universities, research institutes and the impact agenda. This session was chaired by Nikos Kastrinos (from the European Comission) and featured Dietmar Braun, Philippe Laredo and Vanessa Terrazzoni (of EPFL).

Photo: (left) Vanessa Terrazzoni; (middle) Philippe Laredo; (right) Dietmar Braun

The final session opened with Terttu Luukkonen presenting her work on the ERC’s impact on research funding organisations and funding landscapes. Many of the themes of Terttu’s work were then taken up in our third and final panel discussion of the day, on the effects of research funding organisations and funding schemes, chaired by European University Association Deputy Secretary General John Smith and involving our advisory committee member Chris Caswill, Richard Whitley and Deputy Director for Research Projects of the Polish National Science Centre, Justyna Wozniakowska.

Photo: (L to R) Richard Whitley, Justyna Wozniakowska, John Smith (chair), Chris Caswill

The day was closed with an engaging summary and recap from Jesus-Maria Alquezar-Sabadie, our ERCEA officer for EURECIA:

Photo: Jesus-Maria Alquezar-Sabadie

Jesus-Maria also reminded everyone present that the next step for EURECIA will be the production of the overall synthesis report. This is currently in draft form and will be completed by the end of April 2012, and made available via this website as soon as possible afterwards.

Photo: Some of the Final Workshop attendees

Lastly, you can find all the presentations from the day at the bottom of our Final Workshop page. Our thanks again to our hosts at the ERC and to everyone who came and helped make it a very interesting and fruitful event!

Dr Duncan Thomas

Project lead Maria Nedeva and the EURECIA team have produced an Executive Summary of the EURECIA project for the Workshop. There are also individual reports addressing the various science system aspects we explored – researchers, research content, research careers, research organisations and both national and European research funders. These materials are complimented by two cross-cutting reports from team members Prof. Richard Whitley and Prof. Dietmar Braun, reflecting on the EURECIA project overall, and discussing impact on funding schemes in general, respectively.

A flyer for the Workshop and a near final version of the agenda are also now up on the Final Workshop page.

We will report back here about the debates and dialogue we hope to stimulate at this Workshop, along with photos and news from the actual day of the event.

Dr Duncan Thomas

Over two days the team also updated each other with feedback and learning about our methods and research instruments. We also talked at some length about the ongoing integration of our various ‘work packages’ – including cross-cutting themes.

The project has recently been granted an extension. EURECIA’s project head, Dr Maria Nedeva, discussed this with the team in light of our planned final conference. News about this – and other relevant dissemination events – will be shared via the EURECIA website as soon as the appropriate details are confirmed.

In the meantime, here is a photo of most of the members of the EURECIA team, pictured within the research centre building occupied by the Manchester team (the MBS Manchester Institute of Innovation Research):

Dr Duncan Thomas

Dr Terttu Luukkonen addresses in this paper the evolution, concept and mechanisms of the European Research Area (ERA), including how the new European Research Council (ERC) and its programme fits into the ERA concept and was justified in ERA documents.

She explores how the debate on an ERC changed the ERA agenda. In her paper, Dr Luukkonen also highlights the fact that the ERC is in many ways a unique funding scheme, differing a great deal from other new funding instruments introduced at the same time.

You can access the paper via our Official Documents page or by using this direct link.

Dr Duncan Thomas

The project builds on the premise that the legitimacy of a research funding agency depends on the legitimacy of its core procedures and mechanisms. Core procedures are those applied in the process of distributing resources where more often than not some form of peer review is used.

There is also a comparative element to this study. This will involve examining peer review practices by research funding agencies both in European countries and in the United States.

Dr Duncan Thomas

A very early version of Maria’s paper was originally presented at the EGOS Colloquium held in Amsterdam during 10-12 July 2008. Later a more developed version of the paper was presented at the 9th Conference of the European Sociological Association (ESA) in Lisbon during September of this year.

Intellectually, the ideas in the paper helped shape the EURECIA proposal. They are also currently informing an imminent research proposal to the ESRC to study the change of the UK’s public system. This work is in conjunction with Prof. Rebecca Boden and Prof. Rosemary Deem and will be submitted shortly.

Please remember if you have any comments about our EURECIA papers do feel free to contact us.

Dr Duncan Thomas

Dr Duncan Thomas

Just over two weeks ago the EURECIA team met in Lausanne to discuss the project’s methodology, conceptualisation and upcoming fieldwork. The two-day meeting turned out to be a successful, productive and pleasant event. Although the team members are approaching the challenges of the project from different academic backgrounds and traditions, there has been a discernible integration of everyone’s views since our last team meeting in Manchester back in April 2009.

The meeting importantly also provided all the team members with a clear and shared understanding of the cases, countries and organisations we plan to address and approach within our research fieldwork. Everyone in the coming months will be finalising their research instruments then coordinating across the team to undertake the work so as to make the best and most efficient use of our travel and human resources, in line with our original plans in the project’s description of work.

We should also mention that we were very fortunate to have remarkably fine and sunny weather in Lausanne! We had a very busy schedule over the two days but managed to find a moment to gather the team together for a quick outdoor group photo in the sunshine. We’ve posted this below.

Dr Duncan Thomas

The EURECIA team will be meeting on Monday 26th October in Lausanne. We aim to discuss and integrate many challenging aspects of our conceptual and methodological work so far. This is before we shortly all embark on our first main stages of fieldwork.

We’ll post a short report back about the meeting here on our blog.

Please remember that you can also subscribe to our news feed to make sure you don’t miss any of our updates about the EURECIA project.

Dr Duncan Thomas

In the coming weeks and months we’ll also be adding new content to our resource centre including working papers and conference papers from the EURECIA team. We’ll be posting on our news blog when new items are added and we’ll also use the blog for updates about various other developments within the EURECIA project.

We firmly believe our research project is highly topical and intellectually challenging and may have significant implications for the ways in which academics and policy-makers think about the funding and assessment of European science and research. We are very much looking forward to sharing our debates and progress through the blog. We warmly invite your comments and open discussion about our ideas and findings.

We also hope to post details here soon about the EURECIA project’s final conference. You can sign up to email alerts from us about the conference on our contact page. You will then receive the first details as soon as they are announced.

Dr Duncan Thomas