DR LLOYD ANDERSON, PROFESSOR LORNA CASSELTON AND DR BERNIE JONES

6 JUNE 2007

  Q220  Dr Harris: That is the key thing above all the others that is so important for you. What about the fact about recording information? I would say that underpinning all of this is the need to record information about international collaboration because without that data it is very hard to measure progress.

  Dr Jones: That is very true. I do feel a little bit sorry for the Research Councils on this because this was a question that they were recently asked, that they have been asked in the last couple of years, and just before those questions were asked we understand that they had introduced a lot of new systems which did not reflect the need for this information to be gathered at all. We can appreciate that it is a bit difficult for them at this stage to go out and collect this data, but if we were able to have that data it would be a very good thing.

  Q221  Dr Harris: Can I just ask again about the international mobility of scientists and engineers? In your evidence say it is not clear that the Research Councils' policies internationally (or a lack of them) have any particular impact on post-doctoral mobility. Can you explain why you feel that it is and what would you like them to do more of to enhance that?

  Dr Jones: There are two sides to that. The first is that at the moment, because scientists are more or less left to themselves when it comes to international collaboration, if they want to collaborate they can go and find mobility funds from the Research Councils who have relatively generous schemes, from the Royal Society, from the British Council, from a number of providers, so they can be mobile. That is why we said it was not particularly affecting mobility because they are able to by themselves be mobile. What we would like to see the Research Councils doing is encouraging them to be more mobile and then provide some follow-up funding. The other side of the answer to that is that we do think the Research Councils could do a lot to support the mobility of post-graduate researchers rather than post-doctorate ones.

  Q222  Dr Harris: You think this is important in and of itself beyond the international collaboration for the careers of scientists—you may have heard our previous exchange where there was a question about whether it was really desirable to have to go abroad. Is it a perception of your academy that it is increasingly important to build up CVs to be able to go abroad?

  Dr Jones: It is our perception—and Lorna can give you her own views on that—it is also, however, importantly the perception of our principal overseas partners who tell us when we go out there "We rarely see your PhD students out here in our country; we see many German PhD students, we see many French PhD students, we see many American PhD students, we see very few British PhD students, they do not understand us, they do not come here."

  Professor Casselton: That brings up another issue which is, of course, the language problem; we are notorious for not having language skills and this was brought up very much in the meetings we have just had at the Royal Society this week, about the fact that Russian is daunting as a language for someone who is going to spend a short time there doing research, but I think and I am sure you would agree that it is a very important part of their training that young scientists going to work in places like China or other countries would actually enjoy learning the language and we feel that the Research Councils should in fact be encouraging that sort of visit so that they do, it makes us more international and we are going to have to be more international.

  Q223  Dr Harris: Most researchers would say "I will get a couple of publications out" than learn a language because they probably would not find any potential employer that would be forgiving about a publication gap while they learned a language possibly, or had children.

  Professor Casselton: As a fellow Oxford person I would say that might be an attitude at Oxford, but I think you are wrong there; you would get the papers out and they would be learning the language at the same time.

  Q224  Dr Harris: Finally on the point of mobility, you say in your evidence, "Policies related to the travel of UK PhD students should take into account the needs of those scientists with family or other commitments." What do you mean by that because you heard in the previous session that it is generally the policy (or not) for the host institution to see if they can provide for a partner post, and the US universities do this in particular, we probably do not do it so much here? What do you mean by that statement?

  Dr Jones: That statement was made in connection with our recommendation that more PhD students be encouraged to go overseas, but we acknowledged that that was a problem. I would agree with the previous panel who said it is not necessarily the responsibility of research councils to pay an extra salary for that period of time, but they may be able, in conjunction with the British Council and the Foreign Office negotiate some sort of schemes with the overseas partners so they would give some sort of support or would provide some sort of environment which would encourage that.

  Q225  Dr Harris: Dr Anderson, do you have any points on what the Research Councils can do, firstly, to stimulate the mobility of researchers to and from the UK and on anything you have just heard?

  Dr Anderson: For the last three years the British Council has been running an EU/OSI-funded project called Network UK which is to help foreign researchers relocate to the UK for a period of work. The policy for that comes from a high level working group on barriers to mobility in Europe, which discovered that having awarded Marie Curie fellowships to a number of people they did not necessarily take those fellowships up and so they wanted to know what the reasons were for that. A lot of it comes down to domestic issues. We have touched on a very important one, which is about finding a job for your partner; there are other issues such as child care, being able to open a bank account, being able to find accommodation and so on. The universities exercise a good duty of care at the undergraduate level, but as you go up through post-graduate to post-doc and so on the extent of that duty of care falls away, it becomes something that the individual supervisor who has invited the researcher to come may or may not worry about. We have been trying with this project to give all the sorts of information that would make it easier for researchers to come here, and on the point about jobs we have in fact put a job search engine onto the website so that researchers are able to look for jobs for their partners in the localities that they are going to. I would agree, I cannot see that the Research Councils should be funding or providing financial support for the partner but they could certainly be assisting us in pointing out what jobs are available—there may be other jobs within the university or within the education system or whatever. I have also said in our evidence that we were somewhat disappointed by the Research Councils' lack of interest in the EU project that we are running.

  Q226  Dr Harris: That is in that portal that you were mentioning, the mobility portal for research.

  Dr Anderson: Yes, and that is a mistake. Certainly at the moment if you look at the statistics for the Marie Curie fellowships across Europe, then there is a very, very large peak for the UK and every other country has a much smaller share of the Marie Curie fellows. A lot of that is to do with the English language, but it is also to do with the fact that Britain is seen as the place to come for science but we cannot assume that that position is going to remain. Germany and France are getting much more sophisticated in the ways they attract researchers to come. France, for example, offers a sort of research passport—before you ever leave your own country you can get this passport from the French foreign ministry that enables you to fast-track visa, to find cheap accommodation, to get discounts on things, to open a bank account. A bank account will be waiting for you when you get to the country. They are doing lots of measures, therefore, to encourage the inward flow of researchers.

  Q227  Dr Harris: Whereas we just have queues.

  Dr Anderson: We just have queues. Sorry.

  Chairman: I will leave that there if I could, because I want to try and get Chris in just before we finish and we only have seven minutes left.

  Q228  Chris Mole: I get the impression that you would welcome the development of dedicated funding streams for international research activities within the Research Councils; how would you respond to concerns that such funding might be taken from other areas such as basic research?

  Professor Casselton: If the Research Councils do not have additional funds then obviously it will be taken away from the traditional funding streams, but really what we are saying is that we have to be more outward-looking, we have got to go out.

  Q229  Chris Mole: Even at the expense of basic research.

  Professor Casselton: We said that a small percentage of the Research Councils' budget would be enough to fund the research we are thinking about, so I do not think we would be jeopardising too much fundamental research in the UK—in fact, we would be enhancing it because we would be having our researchers working with researchers elsewhere, equally funded, twice the number of people working on the project and presumably twice the productivity. It is probably going to be fundamental research, or it could be.

  Dr Anderson: Science is an international endeavour, it is no longer a national endeavour, so it has to be a priority for the Research Councils. Going back to the Lord Sainsbury figure, 5% of the science done in the UK, 95% is not. You do not see similar sorts of proportions applying to the way that the funding is distributed in the Research Councils' activities, so perhaps there needs to be some levelling up.

  Q230  Chris Mole: What would it look like in terms of follow-on funding; can you give us some examples of how the support through follow-up funding would benefit the research community?

  Dr Anderson: I would point to the States. The US has been very successful in attracting researchers by simply inviting post-docs to work in labs and providing money for post-docs to be able to do that.

  Q231  Chris Mole: How would that differ from normal response mode funding?

  Dr Anderson: The response mode funding is on the back of a UK researcher, as I understand, submitting an excellent proposal and going through peer review. There can be a component of that that is for international activity, but the primary focus is for that piece of research to be done in the UK by the UK researcher; it is not the same thing at all as having schemes which enable foreign post-docs or post-graduates to be able to come to the UK and work the periods in excellent labs.

  Dr Jones: The important point to make is that it is not money taken away from UK basic research, it is just money given to UK basic research in a slightly different form because that research has to be international, and there are many different ways that the Research Councils, together in partnership, could do that. Just to give you one example of what it might look like is that next time Sir David King or the minister sit down with their Chinese counterparts they say "Right, we from the British Research councils have £20 million to put on the table; are you willing to match that funding?" to which the answer will probably be "Yes" and then the Chinese funding agency and the Research Councils in the UK can sit down together to explore on which particular themes those calls might be made and how that £20 million might be split up between the UK Research Councils and sort out how the double jeopardy can be addressed, all of those sorts of process issues, and then the call is made, joint research teams apply for it, win the funds, the UK Research Councils fund the work in the UK and the Chinese fund the work in China, but it is aligned and it has been put on the table so it is a great political success and it is a success for UK science.

  Dr Anderson: Can I illustrate this with an example? I mentioned that there was a year of awareness-raising in Canada; one of the concrete things that came out of that was an agreement between the British Council and the National Research Council of Canada to create a joint research fund which ran for three years. At the end of those three years we said we need to use our money for other things and went to EPSRC to ask them if they could pick up the UK end of that scheme, but they could not. They could not because they insisted that all proposals on the UK side went through their peer review system and the Canadians should go through theirs, so the issue of double jeopardy was such a problem that in the end, despite the fact that the Canadians were prepared to pour a lot of money into a bilateral scheme, the UK could not pick the other end up. Something went badly wrong there.

  Q232  Chris Mole: Can I finish then with looking at metrics. Professor Casselton mentioned the progress in French and German investment and when we look at the UK share in international co-publications you can see what has been happening there; is that the right metric for measuring international collaboration, and how do you measure the success impact of international activities within your own organisation?

  Professor Casselton: It is a good measure of international collaboration, yes.

  Q233  Chris Mole: That example.

  Professor Casselton: Yes, at one level. Sometimes it is difficult in that international collaboration occurs without funding and so some of the best laboratories are talking to each other, but it is a good measure of how much collaboration is going on and it is one that people like China—and I do mention China a lot today because we have been surrounded by Chinese for the past two days—they are very, very conscious of what it means in terms of publications and that is what they want, good publications with good collaborators.

  Dr Anderson: It is different for the British Council. It goes back to the point that we are seeking different outcomes. The problem with science metrics and the British Council is that if we look at the standard performance measures of numbers of co-authored publications or the leverage of downstream funding from the framework programme or whatever, whilst in themselves they are very good measures—as Lorna is saying, within the British Council there is a `so what' factor because these metrics do not relate particularly well to our outcomes. What has been interesting is that OSI and the Foreign Office recently collected evidence about collaborations in China and India, and if you do a retrospective analysis you will discover, going back 10, 15, 20 years, that a lot of these collaborations which are now so important started out as a British Council travel grant or something like that. That is a very useful measure because it demonstrates that a relationship has been established which has worked in the long term and has led to an increase in scientific output.

  Q234  Chris Mole: I am not sure if you are saying that is a metric you have or you should have.

  Dr Anderson: It is one we are working on.

  Chairman: On that note I will bring this session to an end. Professor Casselton, Dr Bernie Jones and Dr Lloyd Anderson, thank you very much indeed for coming before us this morning; we have very much enjoyed our exchange with you.