Social Media, Networks and Impact

A couple of years ago Nadine Muller, a cultural historian and English literature researcher at Liverpool John Moores University, visited the University of Kent to talk about how she used social media in her work. One thing that stood out was how much of her efforts were based around creating a virtual community.

Muller studies the cultural understanding of widowhood. By engaging with widows’ groups on Twitter, she has gained access to a more personal well of experience. She has also connected with people beyond academia who might benefit from or be interested in her research, including policymakers, teachers and informed lay people.

Research, especially in the humanities and some areas of the social sciences, can be solitary work. Social media, Muller said, allowed her to discuss her work and interact with people without leaving her desk. It also gave her a chance to think aloud, and to run a rough draft of a paper or a research project past people before taking it further.

The same goes for those of us who support academics. At the European Association of Research Managers and Administrators (Earma) Conference this year, I am linking up with colleagues from the universities of Ghent and Coventry, and University College Dublin, to deliver a session on using social media. 

Lighting a Candle

For most of June I've been travelling. I went up to Birmingham for the ARMA Conference, and then spent a week in Ghent with my team on an Erasmus+ exchange with colleagues at the University there. Finally, I was at the EARMA Conference in Lulea in Sweden last week.

And those three weeks brought home to me what a wonderful continent Europe is. From the vibrant, multi-cultural metropolis of Birmingham, to the cosmopolitan, relaxed and historic centre of Ghent, to the natural wonder of Lulea and the glittering archipelago of Stockholm: it is a diverse, open and inclusive continent, rich in history, but forward looking. 

Now you will have noticed that I included Birmingham as a natural part of Europe. Because to me it is: the UK is a part of Europe. Whilst the Channel is a geographic boundary, in all other ways the UK is strongly linked with the mainland. Economically, historically, culturally, environmentally, scientifically: on every level we are Europe. 

Which is why the Referendum result on Friday morning felt like a body blow. The messages, like telegrams, came in as I was driving back from Gatwick, from Stockholm, in the early hours, and the darkness that surrounded me felt foreboding.

Learning to Love Poor Success Rates, and the Future of European Funding

EARMA: awash with conference coffee

Conferences are strange beasts. They're slightly unreal. It might be all that conference coffee, and having large, formal meals at times when you're not used to having large, formal meals. It might be all the fractured conversations you have, or the sense of bewilderment as you try and find the Wellington Suite for the fourth parallel session of the day.

At the European Association of Research Managers and Administrators (EARMA) conference in Lulea this week the unreality was compounded by the fact that the sun never really sank below the horizon. And, whilst most of the speakers (myself included) stuck squarely to the script, some seemed to have been affected by the parallel reality of sub-Arctic Sweden.

Metric-ulation

One of the themes - intentional or otherwise - of EARMA2013 was metrics. Maybe that's an inevitable rule of the sector: whenever more than two research managers meet in one place they shall talk about metrics.

That's not to say it's not interesting. This time we had two sessions, one from Prof John Green of Cambridge talking about Snowball Metrics, and one from Dan Nordquist of Washington State University and Martin Kirk of the University of British Columbia talking about how they used Thompson Reuters and SciVal respetively.

Metrics, for anyone who hasn't met with a research manager recently, are the figures used to assess the performance of your university. They are potentially very useful. They can help you to back up or dispell hunches as to how you're doing. They can help to identify what you should or should not be prioritising. In a word, they can help you strategise.

This was certainly the claim of all four speakers across the two sessions. Snowball Metrics had been developed by eight UK Russell Goup universities which recognised that the figures that they were currently using were not robust. they were reliant on shaky data that had been harvested, generally, by third parties trying to sell their league table software. What was needed was an agreed set of parameters, and an agreement between all those involved to share the results.

Green, in his usual bluff and robust style, said that Snowball had achieved everything they had hoped for. As ever, he gave the impression that anyone that didn't agree with him was, franky, deluded. Like a cross between Robert Winston and a terrier, he bounded around the conference hall, prodding us all with a metaphorical finger, and asking us to rate his product on a scale of 1-10, with 1 being 'quite brilliant' and 10 being 'brain-meltingly brilliant'.

Even allowing for ego, what he was presenting did appear to be very good, and a sensible step forward. There is too much 'hunchwork' in the sector, too many fingers in the air, too few hard comparables. He suggested that the next step for Snowball would be to extend its reach internationally. but what, I wondered, for the rest of the UK sector?

The sense I got was that they really weren't worth dealing with. The eight partners already accounted for some 45 per cent of research funding in the UK, and roughly the same percentage of highly rated outputs. Why should they bother with the 150 or so other UK institutions when the gentlemen from Harvard, the Sorbonne and Max Planck were waiting in the ante room?

Dan and Martin, by contrast, were a little more ambivalent. Whilst both were glowing about the potential of their of the off the shelf products, they questioned the price that the suppliers were charging for them, and I couldn't help but wonder, post-Green, if the underlying data on which they relied were robust enough.

Still, what they did show were graphics that demonstrated clearly and quickly what the relative strengths of their institutions were. Using a series of blobs within a circle, which would have brought a tear to the eye of Damian Hurst, they showed by their relative position and size the intensity and interdisciplinarity of the university's reach portfolio.

So how did I feel after a couple of days in the metrics matrix? I felt that playing with metrics will be increasingly important for the sector, and that soon we'll all be studying complicated, elaborate graphs and scatter charts, if we're not doing so already. We'll be setting our course to benefit from the currents and eddies within our territorial waters - as well as avoiding the Scylla and Charybdis. In the current climate, with a shrinking funding pot and increasing concentration, we've all got to be more savvy about our strengths, and any tool that can effectively help with that should be embraced.

Now where's John Green's phone number..?

H2020: Where We're at

Going to a European research funding conference before the beginning of a new Framework Programme is a little like doing a jigsaw with no idea of the picture you're trying to piece together.

Each session gives you a few more pieces, and sometimes you pick up some extra pieces in the coffee breaks in between. You treasure these and hoard them, trying to work out their significance. When you have time you try to join them together and gasp in delight when two pieces join to reveal - some non-descript sky.

By the end you are, on the whole, wiser than when you started. You have got most of the basic picture pieced together, though there are always some key sections missing, and you're slightly neurotic that everyone else has those pieces and they're just not sharing them with you.

EARMA2013 has been no exception. At the end of the first day I feel I've got a sketchy understanding of what we're in for with Horizon 2020, but there's still plenty in the middle of the picture that's missing. I thought it would be useful to summarise where we're at with H2020.

The Structure

The basic structure of H2020 has remained essentially unaltered from the one that was first proposed by the Commission almost two years ago . The sense I get is that both the Council and the Parliament recognised it's logic and took the 'if it ain't broke' route. I outlined it in more detail here, but in summary there will be three essential elements - excellent science (i.e. responsive mode funding for 'basic' research, such as Marie Curie, the ERC, and the Future and Emerging Technologies scheme), the societal challenges (similar to FP7's Cooperation, but with more emphasis on the potential of research to solve society's ills) and industrial leadership (i.e. the enterprise and innovation funding).

The Budget

After late night negotiations last week the EC, Parliament and Council came to an agreement over the budget. H2020 got 70.2bn Euros, or 68.7bn Euros if you exclude Euratom. It's intended that small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) will get 20% of this.
It's less than the hoped for 80bn Euros, but its an outcome, a result, and you can almost hear the collective sigh of relief that an agreement has reached and we can move on to the drafting of the detail. Draft work programmes are already beginning to emerge, and we should have more solid detail in September/October.
The three pillars will divide the budget like this:

• Excellent science: 32%, or 22bn Euros;
• Societal challenges: 39%, or 27bn Euros;
• Industrial leadership: 22%, or 16bn Euros.

The shortfall is made up with schemes that don't involve research, such as Science in Society, is the EC's own in-house research (the JRC), or the EIT.

Rules for Participation

This is where things get more interesting. As always with a new Framework Programme, there's talk of simplification, but this time it seems to be justified. There is an intention to have a single document for each call, not the previous smorgsbord of annexes and additional documents. Thus, it will probably be like a home insurance policy, with an all inclusive document and a covering statement telling you which parts refer to you.
Better still there will be no time sheets for researchers working full time on a European project. The EC is also in the process of drafting a simplified Consortium Agreement, and intends to allow a 'broader acceptance' of each participants accounting rules for direct costs.
Yeah, right. We've got to give the Court of Auditors something to keep them busy, surely?

Reimbursement Rates

Reimbursement rates - i.e. the amount of funding you'll actually get - have been set at a 'simplified' 100% for the direct costs of all participants, and 25% for indirect costs. That's certainly simpler than than the complex algorithms which have characterised previous FPs.
However, there are some caveats. Projects that are 'close to market' may only get 70% funding for commercial partners, and there's talk of a 8k  Euro 'bonus' that projects can seek for non-profit partners.
In addition VAT will be an allowable expense.

Time to Grant

Most heartening of all, the EC is going to try to cut the 'time to grant' (i.e.negotiation time between being told you've got a grant and it actually being awarded) from the current 1+ year to 8 months. Uh-huh. Is that even possible? The EC certain hopes so. Two possible solutions 'being talked about in the canteen' are a tougher 'take it or leave' it line on negotiations, and asking reviewers to consider the project as a whole, rather than allowing them to favour the projects that excite them in principle, and leaving it up to EC officers to try and work out how to make it work in practice.

New Innovation Measures

Whilst many elements of H2020 will be a continuation of FP7, albeit reconfigured, the EC does intend to introduce additional funding to support innovation. This may include prizes, including inducement to commercial organisations to take part, and a 'fast track to innovation' scheme, which would have a rolling deadline, and would offer up to 3m euros for no more than 5 partners.

Open Access

The EC ran a pilot on OA during FP7. It is believed they are happy with the results, and want to roll it out throughout H2020. The costs of doing so - i.e. funding for article processing charges (APCs) can be included in a project, but will have to be included in the orginal budget. So bear that in mind when you come to us for your costing.

Encouraging EU-US Research Collaboration

The 2013 EARMA Conference kicked off with a full and frank assessment of the progress on the Bilat project. This had been funded under the FP7 Coordination pillar to try and encourage more involvement of American researchers in European projects. Who wouldn't want that?

Well, a whole raft of American universities, as it turns out. Although over 4,000 American academics and researchers have got involved in FP7 applications, of which around a quarter are successful, 40 per cent pull out during contract negotiations. The reason? The EC's fearsome bureaucracy.

When you think about it, this isn't a great surprise. The Americans have enough on their plates coping with the demands of the NIH, the NSF and other federal funders. To them the EC is small fry, and why should they bother untangling a whole new bureaucracy, and learning a whole new legal, contractual, financial and reporting system? To quote the Kids of Grange Hill, just say no.

And it was clear that the feeling was mutual. Agatha Keller of EU Grants Access spoke about her experience of having to learn the language of the NIH when the universities of Zurich were getting more than ten times as many projects from the EC.

However, all is not lost. Although a large number of American partners drop out during the negotiations stage, 88 per cent of them continue to maintain a relationship with the project. So the funding is not a deal breaker. The US collaborators really want to work with their EU colleagues.

What should be done to make this possible? Well the promised simplifications of Horizon 2020 will definitely help - as long as they materialise, of course. But Prof Manfred Horvat, who conducted a survey on behalf of the EC on its research cooperation with the USA, finished the session with some firm suggestions;

• Raise the visibility of the Framework Programme amongst American universities. This might be easier said than done; most American institutions are very 'mission oriented', and anything that falls beyond this is treated as an afterthought. 
• Get individual European countries to work more closely together, and present a more coherent, unified front. He gave a startling example, from his last visit to Washington, when he went to a number of European embassies, all of whom trumpeted their bilateral agreements with the US in nanotechnology, but none of whom were aware that any of their European colleagues were doing the same. At the very least all 28 EU states could set up shop together in the same building in Washington, so that it became a 'one stop shop' for American HEIs, as well as allowing the sharing of information between member states.
• Encourage 'bottom up' engagement in the US.
• Develop strategies for collaboration in the ERC, ETPs and JTIs.
• Stimulate mobility between US and the EU.

Whether this comes to pass remains to be seen. There has to be the political will to make it happen. With the simplification of H2020, as well as the desperate need to dig the world of the economic hole its in, the time might just be ripe.