New REF timeline

HEFCE has announced the new time frame for the Research Excellence Framework, after science minister David Willetts confirmed last week that it would be delayed for a year to give HEFCE and academics more time to design an acceptable way to measure the social and economic impact of research.

Here is the revised REF timetable:

July 2010 – Announce panel structure and start recruitment of expert panels
September 2010 – Deadline for applications for sub panel chairs
October 2010 – Deadline for nominating panel members
November 2010 – Impact pilot exercise report and events
December 2010 – Panel recruitment completed
Early 2011 – Panels begin meeting
Mid 2011 – Panels consult on criteria
Mid 2011 – Guidance on submissions published
Late 2011 – Panel criteria and methods published
Early 2013 – Submission system operational
Late 2013 – Submissions deadline
2014 – Assessment phase
December 2014 – Outcomes published
2015 – Outcomes will be used for research funding allocations

Cut particle physics, engineers tell government

Infighting has broken out among the leaders of the UK research elite as professional societies move to protect their disciplines from promised spending cuts.

The often fragile consensus that existed among professional scientific societies has collapsed with the Royal Academy of Engineering the first to argue its corner, saying that engineering is more important to the UK than basic science.

In a submission to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, the academy calls explicitly for particle physics to be cut. The academy says that since most particle physics goes on at Cern, the field makes “a lower contribution to the intellectual infrastructure of the UK compared to other disciplines”. It argues that this field of fundamental science makes only a “modest” contribution to the challenges facing society compared with engineering and technology.

Sense about the Census

There are breezy reports today in the Sunday Telegraph and the FT's Westminster blog that Francis Maude is planning to scrap the census after the one in 2011 (which is going ahead). The Sunday Telegraph is preoccupied by the ending of a 200 year old decision. The FT hasn't twigged that it takes years to organise a census and foolishly mocks the government for thinking it will still be around in 2020 to cancel the 2021 census. Neither seems to have really considered that budgetary savings from cancelling the 2021 census will start much sooner as staff are laid off or, most importantly, the real consequences of this move by the Cabinet Office minister.

The Census underpins a wide range of policy decisions made by public bodies both at the national and local level. To quote from the Census website: "The census costs some £255 million for the UK as a whole, but the information it provides enables billions of pounds of taxpayers' money to be targeted where it is needed most."

New libel bill to protect scientific discussion

The Ministry of Justice has announced plans for a new bill on defamation that should tackle the concerns expressed by scientists that open debate is being stifled by the threat of libel. The ministry's announcement says, "The Government recognises the impact that the current law may be having on freedom of expression, particularly in relation to academic and scientific debate, the work of non-governmental organisations and investigative journalism and will be looking at options for addressing concerns around "libel tourism".

How to read David Willetts' speech to the Royal Institution

David Willetts gave a speech at the Royal Institution on Friday in which he sketched out his approach to science. What follows below is an annotated version of the speech, with my comments in red. Links to other blogs on this are at the bottom. I'll be digesting all this and summarising my thoughts in Research Fortnight later this week [now online for subscribers].

On what both he and I consider the big question, how to get economic growth out of the UK's excellent science base, he is refreshingly pragmatic about the ra-ra-ra stuff we tend to hear about excellence, world class universities and Nobel prizes.

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Thoughts on David Willetts' speech at the RI

There were a couple of interesting things to come out of science minister David Willetts' speech at the Royal Institution today. He confirmed that the Research Excellence Framework would be delayed for a year while Hefce sorts out how to measure impact in a way that wont cause a mass revolt in the universities. But we already knew that was coming. More interesting were his comments on the concentration of research funding, and the economic arguements for government investment in science.

Let's take concentration first. In the speech, Willetts said he was in favour of concentrating funding on excellent research. But (sorry Russell Group) he said "excellence is to be found in individual departments". At a press briefing before the speech, he went even further, saying concentration was "not a matter for entire universities". So it would seem Willetts is backing the 'islands of excellence' funding model preferred by the smaller and newer universities, rather than the suggestion, put forward by the Russell Group's chairman and Leeds VC Michael Arthur, that the government should just give all of its research cash to 30 or so big players.

Cern opens membership to the rest of the world

Cost and traditional rivalry means US unlikely to be full member

The council of the European particle physics laboratory, Cern, has voted to allow any country in the world to apply for full membership, consolidating its status as the leading international facility of its kind.

Cyprus, Israel, Serbia, Slovenia and Turkey have applied to become full members. But a 390-million euro price tag is likely to deter the US from coming aboard.

Until now ‘full’ membership of Cern has been limited to European countries. The US, Russia and Japan have ‘observer’ status, which allows them to construct and run experiments, and attend—but not vote at—council meetings.

In an effort to recognise “increasing globalization in particle physics,” the council ruled on 18 June to allow non-European members to join and also replaced observer status with a new category of associate member, costing 10 per cent of the price of full membership.

Climate scientists rapped for lack of transparency

The rigour and honesty of climate researchers at the University of East Anglia is not in doubt, nor has their conduct undermined the findings of the IPCC, an independent review into the ‘climategate’ affair has concluded.

However, the panel, led by Muir Russell, the former vice-chancellor of the University of Glasgow, found a “consistent pattern of failing to display the proper degree of openness” among the scientists and the university.

The review says that UEA failed to acknowledge the importance of its statutory duties in relation to freedom of information requests and the risk that failure could pose to the institution and climate science in general.

This is the third and final investigation of the conduct of UEA scientists after its internal emails were hacked and leaked onto the internet in November. It has looked specifically at how the group handled requests for information rather than questioning the validity of their work.

After presenting the report, Russell added that most universities in the UK are unprepared for dealing with FoI requests and that they should learn from the experiences of UEA.

Edward Acton, vice-chancellor of the university, has confirmed that Phil Jones, the scientist at the centre of the scandal, will return to the Climatic Research Unit but as its director of research, rather than its director.

CRU is to be absorbed into the wider environmental sciences department, said Acton, in order to relieve Jones of some of the “administrative burden” of the job. This includes the handling of FoI requests.
Acton described the report as a “complete exoneration” for Jones. Its publication would finally lay to rest the conspiracy theories and misunderstandings that have dogged CRU since the hacking, he said.

While CRU scientists were not in a position to withhold temperature data, since it is freely available in the public domain, the panel has concluded that their responses to other “reasonable” requests for information were “unhelpful and defensive”.

The panel has come down heavily on the university for failing to take a strategic approach to FoI requests. There was evidence that emails may have been deleted in order to make them unavailable to climate sceptics but the senior management should have taken more responsibility for the task, it said.

Acton said that the university is likely to accept all the recommendations of the report that relate directly to it.

Jones did come in for particular criticism over a diagram he produced for the World Meteorological Organization in 1999. His methods when producing this “misleading” diagram should have been made clearer, the panel said.

But the panel found that the CRU team had not attempted to obstruct peer review and that the critical emails sent regarding some papers that contradicted their own work were part of the “rough and tumble” of the publication process.

Russell said that the CRU scandal should serve as a lesson “in what not to let happen”. He has urged scientists and the academic world to think about how debate about their work has changed with the emergence of online blogs.

“There need to be new ways of making results and data available,” he said. “There need to be ways of handling criticism and challenge, of responding to a range of different sorts of criticism and getting into a more productive relationship with critics than we have sometimes seen in this case.”
Acton, for his part, said that he would like to see the UK taking the lead from the US on freedom of information rules. This would mean providing access to data but not to communications between scientists.

Playing the blame game

Europe's new member states do not have it easy. 20 years after their liberation from Soviet rule and 8 years after their ascension to Europe they still underperform in research. For every two Framework 7 grants going to the core EU15 states, only one goes to Eastern Europe. Fraud and mismanagement affect international collaborations, with Eastern European countries topping the list of reprimands by the European Court of Auditors. And 80 per cent of funding from the European Research Council stays in the "old member states" as researchers from the East prefer to work in Germany and France, the traditional lighthouses of European science.

If you ask researchers from Eastern Europe, the general mood is that these problems are down to a lack of EU funding. The predominant opinion is that Europe should give its eastern members more money, and Polish, Ukrainian or Czech science will rise like Phoenix from the ashes. During the Euroscience meeting in Turin Eastern Europan member states demanded more international research infrastructures and more money from Framework 7. Some even suggested that the ERC, which funds science solely on the basis of excellence, should give more money to Eastern Europe - just for the sake of it.

Among all this clamour, Western European scientists and policymakers like to point out that their Eastern colleagues have good reason to blame their national governments, and themselves. Spending on research and development is abysmal in many Eastern European member states, with Romania, Ukraine and Bulgaria barely reaching 0.5 per cent of annual GDP. The countries in the East have been particularly hard hit by the financial crisis - Lithuania's GDP fell by nearly 15 per cent last year - and science and technology development just do not feature on political and industrial agendas. And one researcher said that many Eastern European, universities, for all their innovativeness and enthusiam,  do not instil an urge in their students to dig deeper and discover, a precondition for excellent research.

Still, Western and Eastern Europeans agree that there are glimpses of hope. Skype, Estonia's main technology export, developed without major public spending initiatives and Poland, a beacon of science centuries ago, is rediscovering its academic potential, with two million people in higher education in a country of 40 million inhabitants. At ESOF, researchers called for a change in mindset. Eastern Europeans must lose their "sense of entitlement" and start lobbying for national and industry funding. Western Europeans must stop seeing the East as a second class area for research and be ready to use its huge potential of young, bright minds. Once again collaboration is the way forward, not competition.

Science vs The People

GM food, climate change, nanotechnology, evolution. Scientists, naturally, are supportive of research, even though they might be in two minds over the actual subject, or question its outcomes. But often the public does not see it that way.

With issues like embyonic stem cell research it is possible to see where the anger come from. Men in lab coats experimenting on unborn babies? A horrible vision. But what about climate change and evolution? Surely these topics should not create as much controversy as they do? Why does the average Joe on the street not understand that the scientific evidence for both is overwhelming?

At th Euroscience Open Forum in Turin researchers are trying to find some answers to these questions. Nearly two hundred scientists flocked to a talk by Alan Leshner, the president of the American Associatin of Science, to discuss how to disseminate research results to the masses. And in his talk Leshner underlined the inconvenient truth: scientific values do not necessarily match the values of the people.

"The problem does not lie in the understanding. People understand science, they just don't like it," Leshner says. "If the scientific promise and human values conflict, the values usually win."

He urged researchers to be honest about science, to admit that they cannot, and must not, predict everything, and that they too do make mistakes. Attendants at the forum agreed that changes in terminology, finding a new term for embryonic stem cell research and using "man-made global warming" rather than "climate change" could help shift the public attitude.

Engaging with the public, it turned out, is one of the few fields where Europe is ahead of the United States. Leshner complimented on the European way of dealing with the public, to make scientists engage in open, honest conversation and offer outlooks, solutions and, where possible, alternatives rather than dishing out facts and then returning to their ivory tower.

Robert Schenkel, the director of the Joint Research Centre, used April's volcanic ash cloud crisis as an example. Rather than making ad-hoc predictions or refusing to comment, Europe's researchers went out there and admitted they had no clue, but also made it clear they would do everything they could to develop a plan. The result: The public's reaction was one of patience and compliance with flight restrictions. The incident was chaotic and stressful, but the backlash against those who set the rules was surprisingly small.

From the high turnout of visitors to ESOF's public events and the mutlitude of information and do-it-yourself science stands at its exhibition it is clear that Europeans are in ever more need to know about science. Indeed, the latest Eurobarometer survey has shown that nearly 80 per cent of Europeans are interested in research, but it also paints a picture of an increasing critical attitude among the public. It is time for scientists to quell the public's hunger for information and win the support of those they ultimately do their research for. Because in the end, it's the public who vote those into power who decide the next spending cuts.