PROFESSOR COLIN BLAKEMORE, PROFESSOR IAN DIAMOND, PROFESSOR KEITH MASON AND DR RANDAL RICHARDS

9 MAY 2007

  Q1 Chairman: Good morning and welcome to this, the first evidence session of a new inquiry into an examination of the research councils and the international policies and activities of the research councils. I welcome our witnesses this morning. May I start with a question to you, Professor Mason? How good is the UK at international collaboration?

  Professor Mason: I think we are very good at it. My research council in particular lives and breathes international co-operation. Most of what we do has an international dimension to it. We have been doing it for a long time. As in all aspects of the work we do, we need to move forward and to improve and keep up with the rest of the world. I think we are working from a very good base.

  Dr Richards: I would agree with Keith; we are pretty good at international collaboration, particularly with the US and Australia but there are some areas where we do need to make additional concerted effort.

  Q2  Chairman: Where would that be?

  Dr Richards: China, India and particularly from our perspective, the EPSRC's perspective.

  Professor Diamond: I think we are good and very good in many areas. There is an awful lot that we need to do, though, and we have made a really good start. The particular issue that I think is terribly important is that we remove any barriers whatsoever to international collaboration in teams, thereby taking away what is known as double, triple or quadruple jeopardy from the research applicants. Clearly that does require work with the sister research councils in other parts of the world. That has been going on in an enormous amount but there is a huge commitment for research councils to make that happen. My own research council now has 11 different agreements with different countries[1], which have common peer review and thereby the complete removal of double jeopardy. I think things are moving in exactly the right direction. As Keith has said, we have a very good history but there is still much to do and we are working very hard.

  Q3 Chairman: By double jeopardy, do you mean where money is taken away? Do you get an international grant?

  Professor Diamond: No. I mean quite simply is this. If you imagine a researcher at the University of Oxford wanting to work with a researcher at the University of Cambridge on a new piece of economics, then they simply get together, apply jointly to the ESRC for peer review. If that same researcher at the University of Oxford wanted to work with someone at the University of Manheim, until two years ago, they would have had to apply to ESRC from Oxford, to the DFG from Manheim, and waited for two separate peer review processes to work. Had they had a colleague also, say from Belgium, they would have three separate review processes and suddenly you are waiting for the metaphorical equivalent of three crowns on a one-armed bandit in order to get the research project to go. That is not a way to move. That is why across the research councils, and certainly in my research council, we will be moving to remove that so that if colleagues wanted to work together, they can apply on one application form. We jointly peer review and we jointly take the decision to fund the application.

  Q4  Chairman: Does that apply across all the research councils?

  Professor Diamond: In differing degrees, it does.

  Q5  Chairman: Colin, is that the same in the medical research area?

  Professor Blakemore: Yes, it is the same. We can accept co-applicants for any form of MRC grant from overseas.

  Q6  Chairman: Does that apply to countries like India, China and the United States or is it just in Europe?

  Professor Blakemore: No. We have particularly encouraged it for China and the developing world in general.

  Q7  Chairman: Would you agree with the general comment that international collaboration is strong?

  Professor Blakemore: Yes. A surrogate of that is the fact that about one-third of MRC supported research in universities and one-third of publications from our institutes and units involves international collaboration, much of it with the United States, France and Germany but a substantial fraction with the developing world, 13% of publications from MRC institutes and units have a co-author in the developing world.

  Q8  Chairman: Keith, when we received written evidence from Evidence Ltd. (IPA 01), our first piece of evidence that came in, the comment that they made was that the UK "has a good share of international collaboration, but it is not as strong as might be anticipated. It is not expanding as rapidly as some countries and it is less consistent in the biomedical areas where the UK has a position of world leadership of research quality." That seems to fly in the face of what you and Colin have just said.

  Professor Blakemore: I think RCUK has recognised its need to move with more agility, particularly in developing collaborative links in China and in India and in strengthening further our links with the United States. I find that symbolised by the establishment of offices to facilitate collaboration in those three countries.

  Q9  Chairman: Is that a fair comment, though, from Evidence Ltd.?

  Professor Blakemore: I would want to know the metric of the evidence used to support that statement.

  Professor Diamond: Could I ask one question? If you look at other evidence from Evidence Ltd., then you will see that where US scholars collaborate with UK scholars, the citation rates are much higher than US scholars not collaborating with anyone and higher than collaborating with people from other places. In other words, the UK is very much a partner of choice for the US in those areas. I think one has to look very carefully at the data. I have not been privileged to read that piece but we would be very happy to comment on it if we do.

  Q10  Chairman: Does not Germany out-pace us in terms of collaboration, according to the European metric?

  Dr Richards: I think they do with the US but I have just received a letter from the Director of NSF wanting to initiate talks with the SRC on nanoscience digital economy and renewable energy to try to get collaborative research going there.

  Professor Diamond: Sir Keith O'Nions when he visited the United States some two weeks ago had conversations with the NSF and we provided information for him asking for a complete, free, joint peer review across the entire base, which is rather difficult, I understand—and I stress that is my understanding—for the NSF to do. Whereas we are very keen to partner, they have bureaucratic reasons for not being able to do it as freely as we can.

  Professor Blakemore: Of the nearly 1,000 active MRC research grants in universities, fully one-third report either co-applicants or collaborators in the United States.

  Q11  Dr Harris: Could I say what the metric is, since you ask. The metric from Evidence Ltd. was that the recent increase in collaboration, that is the ratio 96:1000 for 2001-2005 measured by co-authorship of research publications, is: for Germany and China, 1.96 and in India 1.81; and for the UK with China, 1.94 and with India, 1.65. Their conclusion is that Germany is increasing its general rate of collaboration with both India and China more rapidly than the UK on that metric.

  Professor Blakemore: Of course ratios can be deceptive. It depends what the starting point is. Are those figures really statistically significantly different?

  Q12  Chairman: This is evidence presented by the Global Science and Innovation Forum, which I think you would all accept is the—

  Professor Diamond: Yes, but could I just ask the question, Dr Harris: was the number you said that Germany had gone to 1.96 and the UK to 1.94?

  Dr Harris: Yes, and for China 1.65 to 1.81.

  Q13  Chairman: What we are trying to get, Ian, is really what all that means.

  Professor Mason: I think, irrespective of statistics, which we can argue about till the cows come home, the lesson here is that we do need to keep on top of the game. The world is changing and we need to keep on top of it. That is what we are attempting to do by forging new ways of dealing with international collaborations, having offices in various key countries, et cetera.

  Q14  Graham Stringer: What is a good measure of success and impact in collaboration? We have just heard a lot of statistics from Evan Harris. I am not convinced that they are the best measure of what is happening.

  Dr Richards: Over what time period is that? I would say a good measure of success in impacts would be better collaboration with a Chinese research group and then in future years when they say, "I need some more research done in that area. I know that people go to the UK", and so they are saying they will continue the collaboration for their benefit. That is the worth of having that sort of collaboration but it takes time to build that up.

  Q15  Chairman: Ian, where are the main challenges for us in this whole area of international collaboration? What are the challenges and what are we doing about it?

  Professor Diamond: I think there are a number of challenges and they go right through the research life course. Firstly, we have to be extremely attractive for the very best junior scholars to come to this country, either for a PhD or for post-doctorate study. The reason is that many of the publications you have heard about are joint between PhD students and their supervisors. Subsequently, those PhD students go back to China, India, Germany or the United States, or wherever, but they maintain a long-term link with the UK and that is something that Randal I think has meant. Right at the beginning we have to be the place of choice to come and we have to make it easy for students and post-doctoral fellows, for the very best, to come. Secondly, we have to reduce all barriers to international collaboration and that is not just simply a matter of the processes I have described, reducing double jeopardy, but also making it easy for the movement of scholars because research projects and joint programmes do not simply happen overnight. People have to be able to engage in a conversation to enable those collaborations to happen. We have to make it easy for those collaborations to happen. That requires research councils, I believe, working together across boundaries. That is a challenge that is being taken up now. My own council as part of a major collaborative of European research councils, which we largely lead on, funded as a European research area. Other research councils are similarly involved with other networks. We need to make those kinds of opportunities happen. Thirdly, we need always to be on the look out for new expansions and new opportunities to collaborate and to make international activities happen. One thing I have not mentioned is international development. I did not know if we are going to address that later.

  Q16  Chairman: We are.

  Professor Mason: May I add to that and stress the fact that most successful, long-term collaborations are built on a person-to-person relationship and not an institute-to-institute relationship. So it is important to get that initial comfort, to get to know people in different countries, supervisor/student relationships or two students who go on to collaborate. It is important to get that right for the long term health of international collaboration.

  Q17  Graham Stringer: Are there particular subject areas where international collaboration is more difficult? For instance, what are the particular problems faced by social sciences in international collaboration?

  Professor Diamond: Actually, you might think there are problems because clearly one has to take into account culture and society, but in many case it is only by a truly careful cross-national application of study that one is able properly to understand, if you like, major social policy because you cannot potentially have a natural experiment of, say, different pensions policies or different child-bearing policies in a particular country. What you can do is see what has happened across different countries, but then you also have to be very careful and very cautious in understanding different cultures. That is why you absolutely do need, and I would stress, not only social science but a humanities perspective to really bring in that cultural perspective. Those are real challenges but they are not challenges which are insurmountable. They absolutely have to be taken into account.

  Q18  Dr Turner: I would like to ask all of you to comment on the role of government and policy makers in promoting international collaboration and research. Politicians talk the talk but do they always deliver for you?

  Professor Blakemore: I am sure my colleagues would all have their own examples of very fruitful interaction with government departments, particularly with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, with the Science and Technology Network, and with DFID. I could cite a number of very productive collaborations with DFID for the MRC including co-funding of major research projects. The OSI has been very helpful and successful in facilitating our interactions with overseas governments, helping for instance in the establishment of the three offices that I mentioned earlier. In my experience, the interaction with other government departments has been extremely positive.

  Professor Mason: I would not disagree with that. There are many instances where the intervention of government has opened doors which would otherwise be very difficult or stymied. If there is one area in which we need to work in the future it is to get some clarity as to why we are engaged in international collaborations. There is clearly a scientific reason and for that the research councils can make judgments and take care of that, but there also increasingly might be strategic or economic reasons for engaging with other countries. I think there needs to be some thought across government, and this is a joined-up government issue, about how that is resourced and driven. It is not purely a research council issue obviously but quite often we seem to have the expectation that we can work in all these areas and clearly we do not have the remit to do that.

  Q19  Chairman: Should they determine that role?

  Professor Mason: No, they should not determine that role.