Research body calls for more funding for ‘free research’

A greater share of research funds should be spent on free research or researcher initiated projects rather than being prioritised for particular subjects, according to the Swedish Research Council, or SRC, in its contribution to the Löfven government’s white paper on the future of research.

The SRC – a Ministry of Education and Research body mandated to advise government on research and channel research funds – has published a 70-page analysis, The Future of Research: A roadmap for the future research system with goals and recommendations, outlining its contribution to the white paper scheduled for next year.

The report says that despite the fact that only Japan, Korea, Israel and Finland invest a greater proportion of gross domestic product, or GDP, on research, Sweden is not at the forefront of ground-breaking innovations.

“Changes are therefore needed to create a coordinated and long-term functioning research system that can support and contribute to excellent research, education and innovations for different parts of the society,” the report says.

Its eight recommended priorities are:

• • More weight on free research projects in the distribution of research funds;
  
• • Better support for higher education institutions towards their researchers;
  
• • Increased concentration on world leading research groups;
  
• • Establishment of a number of national research programmes of 10 years' duration;
  
• • More investment in young researchers' career patterns;
  
• • Increased investments in research infrastructure;
  
• • Securing of gender equality in research;
  
• • Increasing the impact of research to sectors outside academia.

The roadmap is based on 12 separate reports and analysis undertaken by the SRC in 2014, including thematic analyses, research infrastructure, internationalisation, career structure for young researchers and research mobility.

Needed for progress

Writing in the major newspaper Dagens Nyheter, Director General of the SRC Sven Stafström and Chairman of the SRC Board Lars Anell said the eight actions are now needed for Sweden to get into the forefront of European research based on the SRC analysis.

“Better working conditions for researchers is a prerequisite for progress,” they added.

The aim of the report is to promote discussion of how to make better use of Swedish national research investments and improve the innovation capacity and the science base for Swedish higher education. It focuses on research financing, research infrastructure and the research system.

“Today, a great number of promising research ideas are not funded due to lack of funds,” the report says. “Twenty-five per cent of Swedish research is performed by the universities and colleges and the bulk of this is financed by public money. The results from this research are published in publications receiving citations, where Sweden is performing alongside the best performing countries. However, with regard to groundbreaking innovations, Sweden is not in the forefront.”

The most difficult proposal in the report is directed towards changing the basic research component (basanslaget) in the government budget to universities.

Approximately 40% of research in the higher education sector today is financed through this channel, while the rest is financed by external research income from a variety of sources.

“Internationally, Sweden is in a middle position with regard to the proportion of the research that is financed by the basic research component, and there is a significant variation between countries and an international downward trend reducing this basic component,” the report says.

Countries like Denmark, the Netherlands and Switzerland have a significantly higher basic research component than Sweden, while the UK, a ‘research frontier nation’, has a much lower proportion financed by the government. On the other hand, several of the elite universities in the world have a basic research component of up to 80%, the report says.

“A university’s ability to specialise through strategic prioritisation is directly related to the size of the basic research component, and today this ability is very limited,” the report says, arguing that this situation has to change.

Comment

The Vice-chancellor of Stockholm University, Astrid Söderbergh Widding, writing on her blog page, said: “They [Stafström and Anell] argue that the research resources should not be distributed too widely but be concentrated. It is easy to agree to their main proposal that the free project funding should be a basic element in the research financing system and that this should be increased.”

She said universities would also recommend increased basic funding for research at higher education institutions. “An important reason for this is the increased need for advanced research infrastructure, which also is recommended by the SRC, and the stronger need for the universities to take the responsibility to find the finances for this infrastructure.”

However, she was highly critical of the proposal to increase the impact outside of academia of research carried out in universities through the introduction of a new national evaluation system for cooperation.

The recommendation is based on a separate report, Survey of Collaboration at Universities in a Historical Perspective, written by Mats Benner and Sverker Sörlin (March 2015), which focuses on methodology and criteria for evaluating the degree and quality of higher education institutions’ collaboration with societal actors outside the university, in terms of relevance and usefulness.

“The evaluation hysteria is already much too developed and takes the focus away from what the SRC is defining as the most important task: a stronger development of Swedish research,” Söderbergh Widding argued.

Speaking to University World News, Professor Mats Benner from Lund University said the SRC had produced a well-crafted inventory of future challenges for Swedish research, but it would have been beneficial to have a more targeted approach, singling out a few critical initiatives.

Lena Adamson, associate professor of psychology and director of the Swedish Centre for Educational Research, said that in addition to the SRC recommendations there is a need for major investment in, and a significant upgrade to, the status of the field of the learning sciences.

“We need to know much more about how learning occurs and how to make it better in all sectors of society and at all levels in the educational systems,” she told University World News.

“Currently this is not even defined as a separate scientific field when it comes to the general research funding to the universities. Hence we cannot even calculate how much (or rather how little) funding it receives. A knowledge society without a strong national interest for supporting high quality research in this area – to me that is an anomaly. It is time to move forward!”