What's on the Horizon?

Cue 'Ode to Joy' (photo: Phil Ward)

A proposal for Horizon Europe, the successor to Horizon 2020, is due to be published on 7 June 2018. However there have been plenty of hints, suggestions and straightforward leaks already, and the current plan is the worst kept secret ever. So what do we know so far? Well, unless there are significant changes in the next couple of weeks, here are the seven take home points.

The Price of Prosecco

Kortrijk. Helps salve the horror of Brexit (image: R/DV/RS CC BY)

With more detail of the EU's next Framework Programme, Horizon Europe, crystallising in Brussels, it's time to look back at an article I wrote last year on the need for Britain's academic leaders to lobby MEPs and make the case for the UK's continuing involvement. 

When Theresa May wrote to Donald Tusk informing him of the UK’s intention to leave the EU, I made sure I was out of the country. It felt too dispiriting for a Europhile to witness this act of self-harm. I cycled down from my home in Canterbury and went through the Eurotunnel, emerging into the bright flatlands of Nord Pas de Calais and then cycling on to the Belgian border, stopping at the end of the day for a beer in the beautiful town of Kortrijk.

As the sun went down on the medieval square, I thought about the effect that the UK’s withdrawal would have on our engagement with the EU, and in particular how it would affect our work both in securing research funding and in encouraging the brightest European minds to work in our universities.

To Infinity and Beyond

Horizon Europe: an artist's impression

Those of you with long memories may remember the naming of Horizon 2020. There was a competition to come up with a shortlist of names. This was then put to a public vote. Horizon 2020 won by a mere 270 votes. The runner up was Imagine 2020, which frankly sounds more like a futuristic question than a bold title.

This time round they've eschewed a public vote in favour of a decision by an anonymous group, with an announcement slipped out in a blogpost written by Carlos Moedas. I really can't think *why* the EC may have been nervous about putting things to a public vote.

Who Ya Gonna Call?

Downtown Brussels. Help is just a phonecall away (photo: Elliott Brown)

With the news that the UK's participation until the end of H2020 has been secured, now is the time to dust off your proposal and get working for the deadlines in the early months of next year - and beyond. But do you need help with preparing it, or questions about the detail? There is a network of national contact points (NCPs) who can help you. It is sometimes hard to track these down, so here they are, in cut-out-and-keep form:

Grants Factory: Applying for Marie Curie ITNs

2-4pm, Wednesday 10 May 2017

Venue: TBC

Dr Richard Guest

Marie Curie Innovative Training Networks (ITNs) provide funding for doctoral training programmes run jointly between a number of institutions across Europe. They run for up to 4 years and are worth up to €4.5m. There is no limit to the disciplines which can apply, and the University currently has six ITNs running. One of these is Enhanced Mobile Biometrics (AMBER) in EDA, led by Dr Richard Guest.

The next call is due to open in the autumn with a deadline early in the New Year. Despite the triggering of Article 50 UK universities can still apply, and the Treasury has agreed to underwrite any grants that have been approved at the point the UK leaves the EU in March 2019. Richard has kindly agreed to talk about his experience of applying for these complex grants, what worked for him, what he would have done differently, and what people should bear in mind when starting to develop the collaborations.

The session is free and open to all, and tea and coffee will be provided. However, do drop me a line to let me know that you plan to come. 

Bonfire of the Sanities

Since the EU Referendum last year, there has been a lot of uncertainty about what it will mean for UK academics. In the last edition of the Research Services' newsletter, Research Active, we looked at known unknowns, and why European funding is crucial to the University—and the UK as a whole.

Current Situation

The EU has made it clear that, until the UK actually leaves the Union, it is still a full Member State, with all ‘rights and obligations’: ‘UK legal entities [are eligible] to participate and receive funding in Horizon 2020 actions,’ it confirmed.

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.

The Story of O

Ob La Di, Ob La Da: 'Important'

There's exciting news about a reshuffle in the European Commission's DG Research and Innovation (RTD), which looks after the Horizon 2020 programme. From 1 February, DG RTD will be more fully aligned to Commissioner Carlos Moedas' '3 O' agenda: 'Open Innovation, Open Science, Open to the World.'

Whilst Fundermentals is entirely behind any policy directives based on random letters of the alphabet, we feel that Moedas has missed a trick by limiting his agenda to these three Os. They're all very well, but they're a little - well - humdrum. These Os won't set the world alight. They won't inspire the next generation of young European scientists.

H2020 Grant Application Wins the Turner Prize

Excited members of 'ENdlessDIsapPOINTment' yesterday

In a surprise move, the Turner Prize was awarded yesterday to a bewildered group of twenty academics for an unsuccessful Horizon 2020 application.

To shouts of astonishment, the judges announced that the collective, known by their project acronym 'ENdlessDIsapPOINTment', had secured the prize for 'a ground-up approach to recycling an idea multiple times.'

Engaging with Europe

In April I wrote about the European Research Area, the ‘borderless continent’ that the founding fathers of the European Union hoped to achieve. The ERA can best be seen as a work in progress, but that shouldn’t stop academics from engaging with it and trying to influence its future direction and focus.

To many, the European Commission can seem like an impenetrable technocracy. If you ever hear a commissioner speak, it will do little to dispel this notion. I wrote once about the basic components of a Commission presentation. The vital elements are PowerPoint slides dense with text, detailed maps of the process by which directives have been agreed, preferably involving an incomprehensible flowchart, lots of clip art, and a peppering of unexplained acronyms.

H2020: Year One Report Card

Horizon 2020, the European Commission’s main programme for distributing research funding across Europe, has now been running for a little over a year, so it seems like a good time to check in on how things are going so far. 

We have already had 79 calls, and researchers across Europe have responded by submitting 25,903 proposals, asking for some €41bn. Around 14.5% of these have been successful (3,765), totalling €6.6bn. That’s around 8.5% of the total H2020 budget of €70bn for the seven year programme.

H2020: Taking Stock

We're now five months into Horizon 2020. We've had the first call deadlines, and it's time to take stock.

Switzerland Exiled from Europe

EU to CH: none of your penknife/cuckoo clock research here,
thank you very much

These are nervous times for Swiss researchers. On 26 February the EU decided to categorise Switzerland as a 'Third Country' within the new Horizon2020 programme rather than an 'Associated Country'.

So what does that mean? Why should we care?

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.

H2020 Negotiations: a Helpful Diagram

I know you're all itching to know what the timetable will be for the negotiations over the next Framework Programme, Horizon 2020. Well itch no more. Here is a brief run down of the run up to its glorious launch in January 2014. 

•          May 2012: European Parliament’s Industry, Technology, Research and Energy (ITRE) Committee publishes report on H2020.
•          June 2012: Parliament publishes amendments to the proposals.
•          July 2012: final calls to FP7.
•          Nov/Dec 2012: Parliament votes on proposals. The European Council (made up of national science ministers) will vote around the same time.
•          Dec 2012/Jan 2013: discussion (or, if you will, a trialogue) between the Commission,   Council and Parliament about the proposals and amendments.
•          June 2013: agreement should have been reached.
•          Dec 2013: Adoption of legislative acts by Parliament and Council that will bring H2020 into force.

Now that might all sound a bit complicated. Luckily, the Commission have published this useful diagrammatic representation of the process. 

     I think that clears things up, don't you?