Authors: Thomas Zacharewicz, Luis Sanz Menéndez, Laura Cruz Castro, Peter van den Besselaar, Ulf Sandström and Ana Fernández Zubieta 

The manifesto below from European scientists says the COVID-19 crisis should provide an opportunity for Europe to reconsider its science funding models – particularly the emphasis on competitive funding – and focus on a more cross-disciplinary approach to build a better and more sustainable future.

Science seems to have moved to the forefront. For the last three months, national governments have systematically claimed to rely on their scientific advice to get access to the most robust analyses on the current pandemic and to develop evidence-based policies. Simultaneously, funding for research on COVID-19 are at current largely being made available, many scientific journals are providing open access to their content, open data policy is implemented at many levels to speed up the development of possible treatments and solutions, and collaborative, cross-disciplinary and open science is strongly being pushed forward. Current exceptional circumstances are of course at the source of this wide salience and declared interest for science. However, many non-critical research facilities have been temporarily closed and scientists are doing teleworking, while clinical labs in Hospitals are overloaded. The present situation and the amount of resources currently unleashed to fight the pandemic also strongly contrasts with research and innovation (R&I) policies implemented by many EU countries over the last decades. One may therefore hope that present enthusiasm for scientific research does not remain as an exception and rather involves structural changes in research policy beyond the COVID-19 crisis.

At the 2000 Lisbon European Summit, the European Union set itself the goal to become the most competitive knowledge-based economy in the world. To do so, Heads of State and governments endorsed in 2002 the objective of increasing public and private investments in research and innovation activities from 1.9% to 3% of GDP by 2010. After being postponed to 2020, the target is today far from being achieved, as the latest Eurostat data indicate an average EU level of 2.2% GDP spent in R&D for 2018, far behind the US, Japan, or South Korea. Only four EU countries are above the 3% threshold.

In parallel, policy discourses have promoted a change in the modalities for public funding, suggesting a move from an institutional funding to a model of funding based on competition for research grants, expecting efficiency gains from more market-alike incentives. This approach has been embedded in proposals inspired from the so-called New Public Management in favour of new governance models of science in which competition is based on top down steering and strong management in research organizations, instead of (bottom-up) collaboration between scientists and research institutions. Results from these trends tell us that there are no identified positive effects of competitive funding on the quality of research, nor from top-down governance of research. The combined stagnation of funding and its increasingly competitive nature (with many funding programs having success rates below 20%) in many EU Member States has clearly weakened our scientific capacity in terms of number of scientists and our ability to provide better evidence and answers to global challenges such as the COVID-19 or global warming.

In contrast with the cross-disciplinary approach needed to tackle the current crisis, research and academic environments are generally characterized by a hyper-specialisation and limited collaboration across disciplines. While specialisation is needed for scientific progress, global challenges and their implications across fields of knowledge show that there is also a need to enable more collaborative approaches. Transversal research designs combining Social Sciences and Humanities with other areas from which they are traditionally isolated (medicine, biology, physics, etc.) are utterly needed to tackle challenges as COVID-19, climate change or threats to biodiversity and, beyond that, to foster a sustainable development as defined in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Addressing these macro-challenges also entails the need to involve all actors of the society -from public research institutions to private sector and citizens- in the definition of possible innovative solutions. A strong-bottom up dynamics in the science system, enabling the combination of scientific talent and resources to explore many directions to find solutions, is necessary, as the corona pandemic shows.

The COVID-19 crisis has highlighted that scientific research in universities and public research organisations is at the core of solutions when it comes to tackling fundamental issues such as a global pandemic or climate change. Science, as healthcare or social security protection, contributes to save lives. As such, it should not be considered as contingent expenditure depending on economic cycles, but rather as a necessary feature of EU societies. This involves the need to increase available public funding and other resources for research far beyond the current levels, which also would enable young researchers and their creativity to enter and stay at the research system on a larger scale. In parallel, a more extensive development of cross-disciplinary projects involving public, private and civil society stakeholders would be needed, together with policies enabling open science. We need new R&D policies and experimentation with new organisational forms and academic careers that could create novel incentives for researchers. Societal demands also require stronger commitment and responsiveness of the research community through providing more relevance to research integrity, ethical norms and general accountability to our democratic institutions. The COVID-19 crisis is undoubtfully a human tragedy. It also carries the opportunity to build a better and sustainable future through a combination of science, knowledge and political responsibility.