BILAT-USA and Link2US publish article in NCURA Magazine

Jan 24, 2012

The National Council of University Research Administrators (NCURA) serves its members and advances the field of research administration through education and professional development programs, the sharing of knowledge and experience, and by fostering a professional, collegial, and respected community.

The January/February 2012 issue of the NCURA Magazine includes an article by the BILAT-USA and Link2US projects about “Fostering EU-U.S. Cooperation in Science and Technology”.

The article highlights the fact that internationalization of science in the last decades has rapidly grown, as shown by the increase of the average distance between collaboration teams, from 334 kilometres in 1980 to 1,553 kilometres in 2009. The number of internationally collaborative articles published in international journals increased from 25% 15 year ago to 35% currently.

Researchers from both sides of the Atlantic have been collaborating for decades and while collaboration is robust, barriers and challenges in U.S. and EU participation in funding schemes across the Atlantic exist. FP7 is open to international collaboration, and one of the goals of this international dimension is to increase U.S. participation. An important structural difference between the U.S. and EU funding schemes that could be an obstacle to a complete understanding of the opportunities of the Framework Programmes, and therefore participation, is that in the U.S., research funding is mainly given to an individual principal investigator, not to teams, and the cooperative aspect of research, fundamental for the FP7, is usually not a required component of U.S. funding schemes. As a result, U.S. participants do not have access to the entire set FP7 opportunities, with the exception of “Ideas” and “People” programmes.

What is still lacking is enough awareness of opportunities for EU-U.S. S&T cooperation within FP7, and EU-based researcher participation in U.S. funding schemes.