PROFESSOR STUART PALMER AND PROFESSOR ALAN JENKINS

6 JUNE 2007

  Q140  Mr Newmark: Professor Jenkins, what would you like to see in a framework for international research activity and how would such a framework improve the current situation?

  Professor Jenkins: The framework ought to at least encompass all activity that we have. There ought to be an awareness first of all. Anybody involved in the international research sphere needs to be aware of what is going on, so communication is very important. Communication could clearly be improved because there are many schemes/major schemes which we do not know about. That is partly our problem but it is also a problem of the other side. There needs to be a forum whereby those funding agencies, those government departments and research councils come together. That needs to be formalised to enable that to happen or force that to happen. I also reiterate the fact that, to be successful, it needs to be a real collaboration and it must not be either top down or bottom up. There needs to be a dialogue and there needs to be a dialogue at the appropriate level which may be at the level of senior scientists and ministers or it may be at the level of senior researchers and senior civil servants, I do not know. To me, the mainstays are those three things: communication, coordination and collaboration and the framework has to pull that together.

  Q141  Chairman: Before we leave the FCO, are you aware of the Research Councils setting up offices in Shanghai and Mumbai and Mumbai and Washington and do you have any contact with those?

  Professor Palmer: The Research Councils, as I understand it, are setting up first of all an office in I thought Beijing but it may be Shanghai.

  Q142  Chairman: It is Beijing.

  Professor Palmer: That will open in September. The methodology is that it will be RCUK but one Research Council will manage it. Then Washington will follow that and EPSRC will manage Washington. Then there will be an Indian office.

  Q143  Chairman: Do you think that is a good model?

  Professor Palmer: What I hope will happen is that it will be modelled on the UKRO office in Brussels which is the Research Council office to provide the interface between the researcher and the European Union, which we see as a very, very beneficial activity, a very beneficial office, and we hope that the offices, as they open in other key places, will play a similar positive role. We see it as exciting and interesting.

  Q144  Chairman: In terms of paying for that, do you think that subscription base with organisations paying a subscription to access those offices is the right way forward?

  Professor Palmer: I would not object to that method if we are getting value for money, yes.

  Q145  Chairman: That forces them to give value for money.

  Professor Palmer: Yes.

  Q146  Chris Mole: Turning to the Research Council strategies for international research activity, if I can play the devil's advocate for a moment, why should Research Councils have a role in promoting international collaboration and mobility and all? It could be argued that their function should just be to focus on support for excellent science and, if that requires international collaboration, so be it.

  Professor Palmer: I do not see how you can separate the two. Yes, their role should be to fund excellent science, to fund excellent science that is focused in the UK, but to pursue that excellent science requires international collaboration and that international collaboration should be at least part-funded by ourselves in partnership with our colleagues overseas.

  Professor Jenkins: I entirely agree. The fact that Research Councils are trying to fund excellent science, we need the best scientists to do excellent science and the best scientists are not always UK scientists.

  Q147  Chris Mole: Let us look at the priority that that should have within what the Research Councils do. You said that the RCs do not give a high priority to international activity. Where should it be in the scale of activities?

  Professor Palmer: A good question again! I think that they do in certain areas give high priority to international science. They do, for example, fund international facilities: international facilities here in the UK and international facilities abroad, and they fund that with a top slicing of their budget but a top slicing of their budget must immediately indicate that they give it a very high priority. What they do not do beyond that is then set aside specific funding streams for international collaboration and, without those specific funding streams, international collaboration is and has been very difficult. I will give you one example, an example of some ten years ago but, as I understand it, it is an example that is still alive today. The University of Warwick was in discussion with KAIST—KAIST is one of the senior research laboratories in South Korea. It was a collaboration that was being initiated in the area of semi-conductors, advance semi-conductors and therefore Samsung were very much involved as well from South Korea. The proposal was that we should forge this relationship and the initial project was a £4 million project. At that time, EPSRC had a memorandum of understanding with South Korea to promote collaboration between EPSRC and its activities and KAIST in South Korea. Immediately, almost at a stroke, the South Koreans produced their £2 million. We went through 12 months of negotiation with EPSRC in competition with responsive mode grant applications rewriting proposals and, in the end, it was rejected. The effect on that particular collaboration was significant but I went back to South Korea and to KAIST the institute there about three years ago and they still remembered it and they still remembered the frustrations of trying to collaborate with the UK and with a particular research team in the UK. So, we do need structures and we do need mechanisms which prevent that.

  Q148  Chris Mole: Thank you. That is a good example. What more would both of you like the RCs to do in terms of promoting international research activity? Where does that sit in relation to the role of individual institutions in this area?

  Professor Jenkins: I do not think it is necessarily the case that the Research Councils need to prioritise international research more. What they have to do is accept that funding international research is a necessity to advance science in some areas. So, the fact that one needs to bring in a team of international collaborators should not be a barrier to doing that research. The mechanism ought to be there for the funding to go to those international collaborators as appropriate. At the moment, what tends to happen is that if we can solve the problem by using somebody within the UK who are perhaps not as good as Brazilian counterparts, then it is mechanistically easier to do it within the UK but we do not have the best expertise on the job. It is not a question of prioritisation, it is a question of accepting that, when it is necessary, international collaboration needs to be taken on board and funded appropriately.

  Q149  Chris Mole: What benefit would you say the researchers in your institutions gain specifically from RC support mechanisms for international activity and how do they compare with other organisations such as the British Council or the Royal Society?

  Professor Palmer: I think that our academics have gained very significantly from collaborating with colleagues around the world in international facilities. We talked about CERN, we talked about Grenoble and we talked about Japan. In those laboratories, you have researchers from around the world who all come together to work together on similar problems. We have gained significantly from that through, for example, the training of our PhD students because the PhD students will go out there with the academics and join them and will research in an international environment which surely is good for them in the next stage of their career. It has also been beneficial because it has made us more competitive in attracting high calibre staff to come and join us in Warwick and other universities. Our recruitment now is international; we recruit internationally for our staff at the university and that is because we can provide that opportunity and we have met them already abroad in these collaborations and they realise that the University of Warwick might only be 40 years old but it is a good place to work or, more importantly, the infrastructure now in our university laboratories is much, much better than it used to be 20 years ago because of the investment that has gone into science and technology. A downside of that is that our PhD students after PhD do not look to go abroad in the main for their post-doc experience, they often get it in the UK because of the facilities that we now have in our laboratories. Our laboratories are state of the art worldwide, so why go to the US or to Japan?

  Q150  Chris Mole: Professor Jenkins, are you not so sure about that?

  Professor Jenkins: I can see that. No, I am not so sure about it. Maybe Warwick has much better facilities than we do in CEH.

  Q151  Chris Mole: While I have the floor, I would like to ask you both a question about barriers to international collaboration which the Chairman touched on earlier on. What difficulties are there in aligning datasets in a whole range of areas of science? It is something that we picked up on recently in discussion with some American scientists about international collaboration difficulties, particularly in environmental science and aligning datasets. Is that something anyone could give leadership to globally in order to ensure that the research work proceeds smoothly without having to spend long periods of time doing that alignment work?

  Professor Jenkins: Absolutely. There are huge difficulties in pulling together appropriate data in a consistent manner to approach the kinds of problems of global climate and global climate modelling in particular. To a certain extent, the UK is at the front of that because the UK has been instrumental in the development of those computer models through the Hadley Centre largely, but it is also something that is very much at the heart of EU thinking at the moment, the coordination of information and datasets through their Inspire Initiative, and this is relatively new but certainly the issue of international data is something which demands international collaboration. It has never been the case that one could phone somebody in another country and demand their national datasets. That is not a good way to work. It does not foster collaboration, it does not foster good science and it is often seen as antagonistic. The way to do it is to ask if people would like to come and bring their data and analyse their data and work on it in conjunction with others.

  Q152  Chris Mole: Should the RCs be encouraging some global bodies to set standards?

  Professor Jenkins: Yes and I think that, to be fair, the Research Councils are aware and signed up to the new initiatives in this area, so I would not criticise them for that.

  Q153  Chairman: When you saw "new initiatives", are you aware of any initiative to do this?

  Professor Jenkins: The Inspire Initiative is relatively new.

  Q154  Chairman: Who is actually leading on the Inspire Initiative?

  Professor Jenkins: It is an EU initiative.

  Q155  Chairman: It is no doubt from the European Research Council.

  Professor Jenkins: No, it is not, it is from DG Environment, I guess.

  Q156  Dr Harris: May I follow up on the point about researchers choosing to stay in the UK rather than go abroad. My understanding is that they are encouraged to go abroad because it is important for their career or is seen to be important to put it on their CV that they have spent some time abroad whether they like it or not, whether they find it convenient or not, whether it is appropriate for women who may have family commitments in this country or not. Is that not a problem in Warwick? Is Warwick different from every other research projectory?

  Professor Palmer: I have not heard of that pressure on the researcher to go abroad and prosper. I think that researchers can prosper just as well if they stay in the UK and they perhaps move from lab to lab in the UK to get experience. Of course, a period abroad is and should be beneficial, but I have never given that instruction to one of my PhD students and I have never given that as an instruction to academic staff with whom I have worked and collaborated.

  Q157  Dr Harris: My understanding is that, when you have two candidates who are otherwise equal but one of whom had spent time abroad, that was considered to be an advantage for all sorts of understandable reasons, that they had exposed themselves to alternative approaches.

  Professor Palmer: Yes.

  Q158  Dr Harris: What you are saying is that it is not a requirement, it is an advantage.

  Professor Palmer: It is an advantage, yes.

  Q159  Dr Harris: You have covered some of the matters to do with Research Councils but I want to probe a little further about what they are doing. Research Fortnight publicised a previous evidence session where criticisms were made similar to criticisms you make in your evidence of the Research Council strategy or lack of strategy and lack of mechanisms and the Chair of Research Council UK suggested, "that view suggests to me that they" in this case the Royal Society "had not read the international strategy of RCUK or that of the Research Councils". Have you read the international strategy?

  Professor Palmer: I have them in my bag! Yes, I have