Is Europe Evolving Toward an Integrated Research Area?

Efforts toward European research and development (R&D) integration have a long history, intensifying with the Fifth Framework Programme (FP) in 1998 (1–3) and the launch of the European Research Area (ERA) initiative at the Lisbon European Council in 2000. A key component of the European Union (EU) strategy for innovation and growth (4, 5), the ERA aims to overcome national borders through directed funding, increased mobility, and streamlined innovation policies

Network communities within and across borders

We investigate the impact of borders on the topology of spatially embedded networks. Indeed territorial subdivisions and geographical borders significantly hamper the geographical span of networks thus playing a key role in the formation of network communities. This is especially important in scientific and technological policy-making, highlighting the interplay between pressure for the internationalization to lead towards a global innovation system and the administrative borders imposed by the national and regional institutions. In this study we introduce an outreach index to quantify the impact of borders on the community structure and apply it to the case of the European and US patent co-inventors networks. We find that (a) the US connectivity decays as a power of distance, whereas we observe a faster exponential decay for Europe; (b) European network communities essentially correspond to nations and contiguous regions while US communities span multiple states across the whole country without any characteristic geographic scale. We confirm our findings by means of a set of simulations aimed at exploring the relationship between different patterns of cross-border community structures and the outreach index.Comment: Scientific Reports 4, 201

Investigating the interplay between fundamentals of national research systems: performance, investments and international collaborations

We discuss, at the macro-level of nations, the contribution of research funding and rate of international collaboration to research performance, with important implications for the science of science policy. In particular, we cross-correlate suitable measures of these quantities with a scientometric-based assessment of scientific success, studying both the average performance of nations and their temporal dynamics in the space defined by these variables during the last decade. We find significant differences among nations in terms of efficiency in turning (financial) input into bibliometrically measurable output, and we confirm that growth of international collaboration positively correlate with scientific success, with significant benefits brought by EU integration policies. Various geo-cultural clusters of nations naturally emerge from our analysis. We critically discuss the possible factors that potentially determine the observed patterns

A quantitative perspective on ethics in large team science

The gradual crowding out of singleton and small team science by large team endeavors is challenging key features of research culture. It is therefore important for the future of scientific practice to reflect upon the individual scientist's ethical responsibilities within teams. To facilitate this reflection we show labor force trends in the US revealing a skewed growth in academic ranks and increased levels of competition for promotion within the system; we analyze teaming trends across disciplines and national borders demonstrating why it is becoming difficult to distribute credit and to avoid conflicts of interest; and we use more than a century of Nobel prize data to show how science is outgrowing its old institutions of singleton awards. Of particular concern within the large team environment is the weakening of the mentor-mentee relation, which undermines the cultivation of virtue ethics across scientific generations. These trends and emerging organizational complexities call for a universal set of behavioral norms that transcend team heterogeneity and hierarchy. To this end, our expository analysis provides a survey of ethical issues in team settings to inform science ethics education and science policy.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures, 1 table. Keywords: team ethics; team management; team evaluation; science of scienc

Report On Available Funding Instruments At Eu Level For Students/Researchers Mobility And Results From A Questionnaire About Mobility In Europe

The mobility of researchers in Europe is a key issue toward a better coordination and alignment of Research, Technology, and Development within the European Research Area (ERA). European interested parties, including research centres, universities and agencies underline the importance of an increased mobilization, starting from the university student level up to Managers. The Task Force (TF) setup by the European Research Alliance, EERA, Executive Committee, ExCo, in April 2016, received the mandate to deliver a recommended proposal for an operational student and researcher mobility scheme for EERA Joint Programmes members. This document reports the first study of the EERA TF. It presents the overview, analysis, and comparisons of existing research and industrial mobility programmes within the EU. This includes specific mobility programmes such as the Marie Sk\u142odowska\u2010Curie Actions, Erasmus+, and mobility schemes ongoing in different EU funded projects within EERA members i.e. the Integrated Research Programme in Wind Energy IRPWind, and the European Liason on Electricity Committed Towards long\u2010term Research Activity Integrated Research Programme ELECTRA IRP, and the, Marine Renewables Infrastructure Network for Emerging Energy Technology, MaRINET2. A questionnaire has been created and distributed on Survey Monkey in order to gain direct knowledge of the mobility actions in different institutions. 76 scientists provided their feedback, allowing having an indication of the effectiveness of each mobility program in mobilizing scientists, their strength and weakness points, and how they can be improved. A major highlight is the unanimous appreciations of the mobility opportunities in providing a large International network and personal development; consequently, there is need of more funding to answer the demand

A two-layer team-assembly model for invention networks

Companies are exposed to rigid competition, so they seek how best to improve the capabilities of their innovations. One strategy is to collaborate with other companies in order to speed up their own innovations. Such inter-company collaborations are conducted by inventors belonging to the companies. At the same time, the inventors also seem to be affected by past collaborations between companies. Therefore, interdependency of two networks, namely inventor and company networks, exists. This paper discusses a model that replicates two-layer networks extracted from patent data of Japan and the United States in terms of degree distributions. The model replicates two-layer networks with the interdependency. Moreover it is the only model that uses local information, while other models have to use overall information, which is unrealistic. In addition, the proposed model replicates empirical data better than other models