In Search of the Royal Society Success Rates

Somewhere behind the Palladian grandeur success rates lurk. Possibly (image: Steve Slater, CC BY 2.0).

One of my roles at the University of Kent is secretary to the Research and Innovation Board, which decides on policy and strategy. I’m not a natural bureaucrat, but the paper shuffling, agenda setting and minute writing are compensated for somewhat by the ringside seat I get for the discussions that decide the institutional direction on research and innovation. 

At the most recent meeting, the board looked at success rates for different funders. In readiness for this we had gathered data on how the university compared with funder averages. For the research councils, this was fairly straightforward. Success rates are produced annually for each of the seven councils, via Times Higher. You can see last year’s figures here.

Success rates for the Leverhulme Trust take a little more digging, but the figures can be found in its annual reports. The Wellcome Trust gives more global figures but does provide a comprehensive analysis by gender and age profile, disciplinary distribution and award rate over time. And the British Academy offers all of its figures when its officers give presentations, such as on these slides given to King’s College London.

So it came as a surprise when I could find nothing on the Royal Society’s website about its success rates.

Questioning the Cartel

Hotel Russell: Post-1892 (image: Tony Hisgett CC BY 2.0)

Anyone whose children are applying to go to secondary school will have been handed glossy prospectuses, with staged photos and talk of inspiring teaching and excellent facilities. Ignore all that and head for the back, where there are data on the destination of the leavers, showing how many have gone on to tertiary education and, of those, how many went to Russell Group universities.

The term is casually used as a shorthand for excellence, a sort of kitemark. There is an unspoken understanding that, while all those going on to universities are to be celebrated, only those going to RG universities matter. And I think that’s dangerous for UK higher education as a whole.

What BBC Celebrity Can I Swap My VC for?

When the Times Higher announced the results of the Vice Chancellors' salary survey 2017 in June there was outrage in some parts of academia and beyond. The salary of Bath's VC, Prof Dame Glynis Breakwell, was 'morally indefensible', wailed the Bath Chronicle, quoting the local MP Wera Hobhouse.

However, the subsequent revelations about BBC pay has put it all in to perspective. Prof Dame Glynis' £451k could only buy you a Claudia Winkleman or a Matt Baker. Steve Wright wouldn't even get out of bed for that. However, it's worth noting that you could get three Darcey Bussells, or possibly one and a half Sue Barkers. Or, if you shop around, a newsroom including Gavin Esler, Justin Webb and Kirsty Wark.

Hmm. Maybe she's not the bargain I thought.

Well, to put things into perspective, and to offer a little light summer reading, Fundermentals is offering you a cut-out-and-keep guide to the trade in value of your VCs. It might just be worth leaving around your senior common room. Good to keep them on their toes.

The Nudge Effect

When David Cameron and Nick Clegg stumbled, blinking, into power in 2010 they issued The Coalition: Our programme for government, which tried to identify the common ground that existed between their two parties. “We are both committed to turning old thinking on its head and developing new approaches to government. For years...there has been the assumption that central government can only change people’s behaviour through rules and regulations. Our government will be a much smarter one, shunning the bureaucratic levers of the past and finding intelligent ways to encourage, support and enable people to make better choices for themselves.”

This idea came from a book written by Richard Thaler, an economist at the University of Chicago, and Cass Sunstein of the Harvard Law School. Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth and happiness was a little like Freakonomics before it: a popular, counterintuitive take on the behavioural psychology that underlies the apparently rational choices we make.

The Rise of the Para-Academic

David Mills and a room of para-academics

The annual conference of the Association of Research Managers and Administrators took place in Brighton at the beginning of June. The event, and the association itself, has mushroomed in recent years. I’ve written before about this exponential growth. At the turn of the millennium ARMA’s forerunner, RAGnet, had 350 members; fifteen years later the Brighton conference, which was attended by only a fraction of ARMA's membership, had 750 delegates.

Part of me is proud of this, and part of me is shocked. Who are all these people? Seeing the delegate list was a moment of existential angst. Why do we exist? Who are we? What are we? The sociologist Laurie Taylor recently wrote in the Times Higher Education about this new ‘tribe’: "Managers and administrators who once had a mute background presence are now a noisy part of the daily life of every scholar. Their ranks continue to swell even though the UK is already one of the very few countries in the world where non-academic staff already outnumber academics."

ESRC Success Rate Drops to 10% for July Open Call

'Swindon, we have a problem'

My colleague Brian Lingley drew my attention to a rather alarming set of data from the ESRC last week. The scores and funding outcomes published in November show that it received 144 responsive mode applications for July. Of those, only 14 were funded, giving a success rate of 10%.

Is this an anomaly? It is certainly less than the 25% ESRC average for 2013-14 given in the Times Higher round up published at the same time. More alarming, perhaps, was the number of high quality applications which didn't make it past the funding cut off point, which was in the 8-8.9 score range. In fact, there were more unsuccessful proposals in this range than there were successful ones.

Thus, according to ESRC's own definitions, it has had to turn away more than half of the 'excellent proposals which are of significant value, and are highly likely to make a very important scientific contribution and/or will significantly enhance the development of the applicant's academic career.'

Professionalising the Imposters

Last week, a colleague at another institution asked me to be their professional mentor. This came out of the blue and shocked me. I was flattered but bewildered, because I’ve always felt like a bit of fraud. What right do I have to mentor anyone?

Of course, such feelings are common in higher education. Ruth Barcan wrote in Times Higher Education earlier this year about this sense of fraudulence among academics. “Many of my colleagues (especially women) gave out subtle signs that they did not feel they were up to the job—almost as though they had been employed in error and would sooner or later be found out.”

The Trouble with Citations

Gender and Citation: Nature breaks down the figures

For the past two years the Times Higher (THE) has published a league table of the top 100 universities under 50. This is a spin off of its more established World University Rankings. Whilst I accept that we live in a league table world, and have joked about this in the past on this blog ('Almost Everyone Can Score Well at Something'), I do have a niggling worry about this latest manifestation of the genre.

Grands Projets: J'accuse

A previously funded large project.

The Times Higher last month published an article by Prof Bill Amos of Cambridge, who questioned the wisdom of funders moving increasingly to backing big projects, 'taking ever-larger bites from a modest and diminishing funding pot.' By doing so, Amos concluded, the funder 'starves the wider scientific community. Consequently, the next generation of scientists is already leaving, and many undergraduates I have spoken to feel that their chances of getting one of the handful of studentships on offer these days are too low to be worth the effort.'

Amos articulated what many of us have been feeling for some time. In recent years there has been an inexorable move by the Research Councils and the Wellcome Trust to concentrate funding on longer, larger grants. The logic is impeccable:  in order to answer the big questions that will make a big difference to society, we need big teams of big hitters doing big science. Or big social science. Or big humanities. Moreover, big projects don't require proportionately more administration, and by cutting back on all those pesky small grants, funders will be saving a lot of time and money in selecting and monitoring the things.

What has particularly rankled in this is a sense that the funders are shooting themselves in the foot. I always believed that the funders got many, many more bangs for their bucks by funding small grants. Principal investigators tended to makes sure that every pound, every penny counted. Better still, these small grants offered early career researchers a first step on the ladder of research funding. Sure, some funders do offer dedicated routes for ECRs, but they still tend to be be substantial, and the success rate as a result is negligible. Small grants with a high success rate allowed funders to light the blue touch paper and watch as the subsequent careers fizzed and whirred, glittering in a thousand different directions. To many, this initial light has been extinguished.

However, up until now this view was, for me, nothing more than a hunch. This changed last week when I stumbled across 'Big Science vs Little Science: How Scientific Impact Scales with Funding' via Twitter (thank you, Open Access).  Its authors, Fortin and Currie, looked at whether it was 'more effective to give large grants to a few elite researchers, or small grants to many researchers.'

Focusing on the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the National Science Foundation of America, Fortin and Currie start by asking what the goal of the funder is. Is it to maximise major discoveries (sometimes criticised as 'photo opportunity science'), or to maximise the 'summed impact' of the community. The authors looked at four measures of 'impact': total number of papers published, number of citations, number of citations for the most highly cited paper, and the number of very highly cited papers.

Interestingly, they found either no correlation or even an inverse correlation between size of grant and impact:  'impact is a decelerating function of grant size'. They continue: 'our results are inconsistent with the hypothesis that concentrating research funds on 'elite' researchers in the name of 'excellence' increases total impact of the scientific community. Quite the opposite: impact per dollar remains constant or decreases with grant size. Highly cited studies are no more likely to result from large grants than from spreading the same funds among multiple researchers.'

Furthermore, 'if maximising the total impact of the entire pool of grantees is the goal, then the 'few big' strategy would be less effective than the 'many small' strategy...funding more scientists increases the diversity of fields of research, and the range of opportunities available to students.'

The time has come to reconsider this passion for large 'ribbon cutting' projects. Whilst funding many small projects might mean that you can't blow your trumpet about unpicking the human genome, it will have a huge effect on a wide, diverse range of research and careers, which might actually have a more positive effect on the health of your discipline - and consequently your profile as a funder - in the long run. Funders, think again.

Meanwhile, in Moscow Airport...

Call me paranoid, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who's noticed the uncanny resemblance between the recent photos of Enemy of the State/Champion of the People (depending on your point of view), Edward Snowden, and the Times Higher Editor at Large/Rankings Editor (depending on your point of view), Phil Baty.

Was it just that they wanted to save costs by sharing a photo shoot? Did they both get the same PR advisor telling them to look serious, quizzical and suspicious at the camera? Did they both, for whatever reason, happen to end up in the transit area of Moscow Airport at the same time? Or are they, in fact, one and the same person?

We, the people, have a right to know. We should be told. I'm off to picket the American Embassy, on the basis that they must have had a hand in all of this.

Who's with me? Anyone..? You, at the back..?

Snowden

Baty

You're Better than That

Well, it feels like an awfully long time since I last posted. 17 Dec! That's almost a month. In the intervening period I've managed to forget everything I once knew, but I'm sure it'll come back to me. Just remind me, what does REF stand for again?

In the meantime the Times Higher gave me a gift that would warm the heart of any research manager: they published my letter. Whilst I live in the county that gave the world 'Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells', I hope the final piece doesn't come across like that:

For those of you who can't read my shaky mobile phone photo, here's the text online. They had to edit it slightly because of space constrictions (eg I gave the figures for 2010-11 as well), but I hope my point came across. What I was wanting to highlight was the fact that it's very easy to make assumptions based on institutional reputation. Everyone would assume that Russell Group or 94 Group universities would outperform a non-aligned university like the OU. However, when you question this it reveals some surprises.

But the publication of my letter was as a molehill next to the Everest-like achievement of my Private Eye Lookalike publication. I may have forgotten everything I know, but this will stay with me forever.

Stats, Black Eyes and Feathers in Caps

'No sir, a reduction in applications is a definite Feather in
your Cap'

As any research administrator worth their salt will know, The Times Higher published the annual stats for RCUK awards last week. In universities across the land there's fevered analysis, trying to work out (like Colonel Cathcart) whether they represent a Black Eye or a Feather in the Cap - or both, simultaneously.

After all the recent mission group shenanigans, I thought it would be interesting to see how the internecine factions within the Russell Group and 94 Group are performing. For this exercise, I've averaged out the figures for the following four groups:

• RG Old: i.e. the original Russell Group, namely Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Imperial, KCL, Leeds, Liverpool, LSE, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham, Oxford, QUB, Sheffield, Southampton, UCL, Warwick
• RG New: i.e. those that jumped ship from 94 Group and joined the RG in the summer, namely York, Durham, Exeter, QMUL 
• 94 Former: i.e. those that jumped ship from 94 Group but are currently unaligned, Bath, St Andrews, Surrey 
• 94 Current: i.e. Birkbeck, UEA, Essex, Goldsmiths, IoE, RHUL, Lancaster, Loughborough, Reading, SOAS, Sussex.

So, first, let's look at overall award value:

No surprise there: the old, 'big science' universities are getting the lion's share of the funding. What is interesting though, is that those universities that recently left the 94 Group to wander in the wilderness are actually generating more RCUK income than those that were invited into the hallowed portals of the RG earlier in the year.

Next application number:

Once again, no surprise: application numbers are down across the board. This is probably largely due to the Research Councils demanding demand management. They want less applications so their success rates don't look quite so pitiful. Interesting, again, the recent departees are putting in more than the newly anointed RGers. Some would say that the newly anointed are showing their quality: less is more. Others might say they are lazy laggards. I couldn't possibly comment.

Next, award number:

Once again, the Russell Group reign supreme, getting almost double the number of awards as their new intake. There had better be some sock pulling amongst those whipper-snappers. Moreover, RG are getting, on average, four times as many as the remaining 94 Group.

Finally, success rate:

A tight cluster here, around the late twenties/early thirties, but interestingly the wandering homeless outdo the folk on the hill (both old and new money).

So what to make of all this? I'll leave that to my fellow research administrators to decide on black eyes/feathers in their caps, and ultimately stats can be twisted to mean whatever you want them to mean (a nice blog post on this from Cash4Questions, here), but I hope it provides a pause for thought and a rethink about how we see ourselves.

Open Access 'Snowball' Continues to Roll

Two interesting news items dropped into my inbox today.

1: The Times Higher reported that the European Commission will back open access publishing in Horizon 2020. Details of the proposal will be published at an event in Brussels on 20 June. The Director General for Research and Innovation, Robert-Jan Smits, was quoted as saying that it could make 'one hell of a difference.'

2: The Guardian reported that Winston Hide, associate editor of the Elsevier journal Genomics, has resigned from the editorial board. 'No longer can I work for a system that provides solid profits for the publisher while effectively denying colleagues in developing countries access to research findings,' he said.

It's an interesting coincidence, and suggests that (to quote Prof Tim Gowers in the THE article) 'the snowball is getting bigger'. However, some (ok, I mean the publishers of paid-for journals) question the desirability of open access. Income from subscriptions, they argue, allows them to spend more on selecting papers, editing and production.

I think this is a fair point, and worth bearing in mind. If funding does not come through subscriptions, they will need to be reimbursed for these costs from other sources. These could well be the funders of the original research, which would, in turn, mean that there is less money available to fund other research.

I'll continue to watch this snowball's progress with interest.

Impact's Winged Chariot

The President of the ERC has rejected the impact agenda, reports the Times Higher. At a conference last week Helga Nowotny said that there was an 'inherent tension' between the blue skies research supported by the ERC, and the 'demands of policymakers for practical innovation.'

'It all looks so easy, so obvious', she suggested, as politicians scrabbled to harness scientific research to pull European economies out of recession. 'But frontier science does not work like this. We cannot programme scientific breakthroughs or order them from a menu...We can't foresee the consequences of what we discover.' Politicians needed to trust 'the cunning of reason' to find uses for apparently 'useless' knowledge.

She pledged to uphold the ERC's independence in the face of political demands. 'It is very obvious that if we were to step back from the principle of excellence by only a tiny bit, it would be the end of the ERC,' she said.

How refreshing. Now I'm not saying that impact is a useless cul de sac, or that it diverts academic time and energy from the task in hand. However, I do think that it is not appropriate for all research and all projects, and we shouldn't have to try and shoehorn all research into impact's glass slipper.

Nowotny should be applauded for taking a stand and allowing the ERC's award holders the opportunity to breathe, to pursue research for research's sake, and not to have to look over their shoulders at impact's winged chariot hurrying near.

Not with a Bang but a Whimper

Well, there was I, popcorn in hand, ready to watch it all kick off after the EPSRC's announcement of the latest runners and riders in the 'Shaping Capability' sweepstakes. Imagine my disappointment at the muted response from the sector. What, no angry letters to The Times? No resignations? Surely some mistake?

The response could, of course, be because the EPSRC has effectively dodged the bullet by (a) only looking at a relatively small number of areas, (b) saying that only two of these will be cut. They had learnt, I think, from their experience with the first tranche of disciplines, when there was a strong backlash against the Council's actions. This time both Research Fortnight and The Times Higher were struggling to find dissidents to rail against the EPSRC. Prof Neal Skipper from UCL suggested that one of the areas to be cut, Hydrogen Storage, was not at a mature stage of development, as the EPSRC Chief David 'Derek Smalls' Delpy seemed to suggest. But that was pretty much it.

The rest seemed to shrug and move on. Even Twitter, the medium of choice for hysterics, was relatively subdued about it. Which is all very disappointing. I'll put my popcorn away until the main feature later in the year, when a decision on the remaining 51 areas (out of a total 111) will be made. There's sure to be fireworks then.

Vive la Révolution! Oh, on Second Thoughts...

An interesting piece in this week's Times Higher had Paul Jump baying for the ESRC's blood as the Council announced its plunging success rates. The overall success rate fell to 16 per cent, 'a decline of one percentage point' screeched Jump, a modern day Tricoteuse, calling on Robert Dingwall to be his Robspierre and release the blade on the ESRC. Dingwall duly obliged. 'It may be time to put the ESRC out of its misery,' he intoned, sadly, suggesting that it might be just as well to distribute the money via QR funding.

Dingwall's view echoes that of Baroness Greenfield, also quoted by Jump in the THE in May. 'Her "very heretical" suggestion...is to abolish the research councils and research excellence framework and divide the research budget, along with the "vast sums saved from the bureaucracy", equally among researchers.'

Is there some kind of agenda amongst the sans-culottes of the Times Higher? Part of me is quite attracted by these radical suggestions. There is a sense in the community that going for Research Council funding is now little better than a lottery. And perhaps Baroness Greenfield has a point: she suggests that we divvy the Research Council budget (c£2.5bn) amongst all those who submitted to the RAE. This, she calculates, would result in something like £82-£100k each per year. It would certainly save us all a lot of bother.

But hold on. A more sceptical - and balanced - view comes from Adam Golberg at Nottingham. He, generously, puts a lot of the rhetoric in the article down to old fashioned journalese. 'It certainly got my attention,' he wryly notes. We still need the Research Councils, he suggests: the benefit of the current, dual support system is that whilst the Russell Group fat cats gets the lion's share of research funding, the project funding offered by the Research Councils allow the 'pockets of excellence' to still get funding for quality projects, wherever they're found. In addition, he notes the difference between a success rate based on all applications, and one based on viable applications. Apparently some 43% of ESRC applications never even made it to panel, and were withdrawn by the office or shot down by assessors. So if the denominator is effectively halved, it makes a much more healthy success rate.

So put down the pitchforks and Phrygian caps, and pause for thought. Now, more than ever, we need to make sure that all have access to Research Council funding, and that there is a champion for the social sciences. The system might not be perfect, but it's better than the alternatives. Though I have to admit, 'vive le statu quo' doesn't have quite the same ring...

Peer Review & Changing a Lightbulb: a Historian's View

This made me laugh and - like all the best jokes - has an underlying (bitter) truth to it. Thanks to the Times Higher, John Fea and David Swartz for uncovering this gem.

_____________________

Q: How many historians does it take to change a light bulb?

A (by Dr. L): There is a great deal of debate on this issue. Up until the mid-20th century, the accepted answer was ‘one’: and this Whiggish narrative underpinned a number of works that celebrated electrification and the march of progress in light-bulb changing. Beginning in the 1960s, however, social historians increasingly rejected the ‘Great Man’ school and produced revisionist narratives that stressed the contributions of research assistants and custodial staff. This new consensus was challenged, in turn, by women’s historians, who criticized the social interpretation for marginalizing women, and who argued that light bulbs are actually changed by department secretaries. Since the 1980s, however, postmodernist scholars have deconstructed what they characterize as a repressive hegemonic discourse of light-bulb changing, with its implicit binary opposition between ‘light’ and ‘darkness,’ and its phallogocentric privileging of the bulb over the socket, which they see as colonialist, sexist, and racist. Finally, a new generation of neo-conservative historians have concluded that the light never needed changing in the first place, and have praised political leaders like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher for bringing back the old bulb. Clearly, much additional research remains to be done.

Response by peer reviewers

Dear Dr. L,

We regret that we cannot accept your historian joke in its present form…. However, a panel of anonymous reviewers (well, anonymous to YOU, anyway) have reviewed it and made dozens of mutually contradictory suggestions for its… improvement. Please consider them carefully, except for the ones made by a man we all consider to be a dangerous crackpot but who is the only one who actually returns comments in a timely fashion.

1. This joke is unnecessarily narrow. Why not consider other sources of light? The sun lights department offices; so too do lights that aren’t bulbs (e.g. fluorescents). These are rarely “changed” and never by historians. Consider moving beyond your internalist approach.

2. The joke is funny, but fails to demonstrate familiarity with the most important works on the topic. I would go so far as to say that Leeson’s omission is either an unprofessional snub, or reveals troubling lacunae in his basic knowledge of the field. The works in question are Brown (1988), Brown (1992), Brown (1994a), Brown (1994b), Brown and Smith (1999), Brown (2001), Brown et al (2003), and Brown (2006).

3. Inestimably excellent and scarcely in need of revision. I have only two minor suggestions: instead of a joke, make it a haiku, and instead of light bulbs, make the subject daffodils.

4. This is a promising start, but the joke fails to address important aspects of the topic, like (a) the standard Whig answer of “one,” current through the 1950s; (b) the rejection of this “Great Man” approach by the subsequent generation of social historians; (c) the approach favored by women’s historians; (d) postmodernism’s critique of the light bulb as discursive object which obscured the contributions of subaltern actors, and (e) the neoconservative reaction to the above. When these are included, the joke should work, but it’s unacceptable in its present form.

5. I cannot find any serious fault with this joke. Leeson is fully qualified to make it, and has done so carefully and thoroughly. The joke is funny and of comparable quality to jokes found in peer journals. I score it 3/10 and recommend rejection.

'Churn Becomes the More Effective Strategy'?

There's been some problem with Blogger last week, and it seems to have lost the post I did on whether to deluge funders with applications when success rates plummet. Luckily, I kept a draft, and have pasted it below. Apologies if you've seen this already.
_________________

An interesting piece by former Times Higher journalist Zoe Corbyn writing in Nature. She reports on a mathematical analysis that suggests that, when success rates for grant applications fall below 15%, applicants should just deluge the funders rather than try to hone their proposals. It's quantity that counts.

You can imagine the funders reacting with horror to this suggestion. All their recent policy diktats have been aimed at discouraging just this kind of behaviour. 'Demand management', to give it its newspeak label, is the policy du jour with the Research Councils, who are seeking to stem the flow of applications and thereby bolster plummeting success rates.

However, the research seems to suggest that more is better. The analysis was undertaken by Paul Roebber, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, together with meteorologist David Schultz from the University of Manchester. It used 'game theory' to model the funding success of two hypothetical groups of 500 scientists whose proposals had the same range in quality but who had different strategies for submitting applications.

And this, I think, is the weakness of the analysis. It's all a bit too...theoretical. Whilst they tried to factor in the idosyncracies of the reviewers (identified as 'correct', 'selfish' or 'harried'), they don't seem to factor in the patchwork of issues, politics, funder priorities and personalities that affect the peer review panels. One factor that doesn't seem to have been included is the irritation of the panelists at seeing repeat submissions - even if the funder allows for resubmissions. Whilst interesting, I think we need to see beyond the theoretical mathematics and develop a more nuanced understanding of what works - and what doesn't - when success rates crash.

Phil Willis: Concentrate Research

The former Chair of the Commons Science and Technology Committee, Phil Willis, has been sounding off in the Times Higher about the future of research in the UK, suggesting that the country needs a "real gloves-off rationalisation of university research".

Echoing the implied (or, in some cases, explicit) call for concentration in the Research Council's Delivery Plans, he suggested that research should be focused in 'no more than 30' universities. The rest should retire gracefully from research, and become US-style liberal teaching only community colleges.

Whilst Willis does not weild as much power and influence as he did as an MP, these are still worrying thoughts. The RAE2008 made positive strides in identifying and rewarding excellent research, wherever it was found. Why penalise pockets of excellence in (let's be frank) non-Russell Group institutions? In some areas of hard science, there may be a case to be made for economies of scale and the sharing of large - and expensive - equipment and infrastructure. But in the social sciences and humanities? Hmm.

Moreover, the concensus is that excellent research informs and drives excellent teaching. Separating the two creates a two tier system, consigning the majority of students to second class teaching, removed from the cutting edge of research, and the elite minority to the ivory towers of excellence.

Separating the two is, I think, a retrograde step. For students at institutions like Kent, on the cusp of that 'no more than 30', as well as all those further down the league tables, there are uncertain times ahead.

'No FP8' Shock

The Commissioner for Science, Research and Innovation, Maire Geoghegan-Quinn is quoted in this week's Times Higher as saying that there will be no Framework Programme 8.

Blimey. But read on, and her grand vision becomes clearer. Speaking before the FP8 Green Paper was launched earlier this week, Ms Geoghegan-Quinn said that "we have been told that the bureaucracy is too much, that there is a huge administrative burden...European research funding is currently spread across too many small programmes...(and) in some cases there are different rules and procedures between them, making it more complicated to apply for funding."

So, instead of a speparate FP8 there will be a merged programme with the Competitiveness and Innovation Programme and European Union funding for the European Institute of Innovation and Technology. This central funding pool - the Common Strategic Framework - will allow researchers to make just one application for funding from all streams, and successful applicants will face just one accounting system when they receive a grant.

Simples, as that irritating meerkat says. Well, let's hope so. Thing is, there's been talk in the past about simplifying European funding, and it's not materialised yet. We'll watch and wait.