Rankings don't affect EU university strategies

After our August summer break Research Europe is back in business. We will publish our next issue on 15 September, brimming with research policy news from across Europe. To give you a taster of what is to come, our guest author James Brooks is looking at international rankings, and what they mean to EU universities.

 

The publication of the 2011 Shanghai Jiaotong rankings last month showed what is already common knowledge – over the past years European universities have not managed to profoundly improve their position in international academic rankings.

We asked the universities of Sheffield, Stockholm, Utrecht and Zurich, who made it into the top 100, if they set much store by their placing. Just how important is a good placing nowadays? Crucially, are their strategies influenced by a desire to climb the table?

The short answer to that last question is “no”. The longer answer, exemplified by Kåre Bremer, president and vice chancellor of Stockholm University, which has climbed seven places over the last two years, is that institutions “would in any case promote activities leading to results improving the indicators used”.

Those indicators are all research-related, with an emphasis on science and medicine. For example, Shanghai’s assessment of quality of education is based on the number of alumni who go on to win Nobel Prizes or Fields Medals. This makes it hard to set a strategy to climb the rankings.

But even those at universities  benefitting from the focus on scientific research can be ambivalent about Shanghai and similar ranking systems. Katrien Maes, policy officer at the League of European Research Universities, says that for some institutions rankings “throw a monkey-wrench into how universities are seen, how their role in society is perceived”.

“Sometimes it goes too much towards this call on universities to be providers of direct economic benefit to societies—the total sum of what universities do is not easily equated to a number of things that can be measured,” she says.

Lesley Wilson, secretary general of the European University Association, talks favourably of the efforts made by the pilot EU ranking project U-Multirank to compile a ranking system that goes beyond assessing research output and includes measures for things like quality of teaching.  

Wilson says that “it’s very difficult, actually, to find the data that will give you a clear indication of the quality of teaching. It’s easier in a national context but the state of the art in terms of comparable data available on these issues across countries inside Europe is not wonderful”.

Rebecca Hughes, pro vice-chancellor international at the University of Sheffield, agrees that international rankings are of limited validity. Sheffield itself has dropped 15 places in the Shanghai rankings over the last 5 years. But the fall, says Hughes, is not reflective of any diminished research output.

“European universities have raised their game and therefore there’s a sort of jockeying for position in that top 100 – it’s very tight,” she says. “It’s not necessarily an indicator of a drop-off.”

Yet Hughes, like Wilson, supports a proliferation of ranking systems. “The more rankings you have that are transparent and look at different aspects of excellence, the better,” she says. “If you’ve got to have rankings, having lots of different rankings is not a bad thing.”

 

If you would like to read more from James, check out his blog my last nerve.

Europe: A soupçon of Joint Programming in the Coordination Soup

It is somewhat paradoxical that, just as the European Commission is striving to simplify access to European research programmes, Europe's research landscape is growing ever more complicated. This is a central question both for the Commission’s green paper on Research and Innovation and the next European Association of Research Managers and Administrators event in Brussels on March 2. Why has this complexity arisen, and what can be done about it?

Pfizer closure shows UK's weakening commitment to research

To lose 6,000 skilled jobs in science R&D may be regarded as a misfortune for the coalition; to lose another 2,400 and a world-class research facility looks like carelessness.

Commission to divert 400m euros from FP7 to pay for Iter

More than 400 million euros will have to be diverted from Framework 7 to cover the rising costs of Iter, the international fusion research project, a Commission proposal states.

Finding the money for Iter means that 100m euros will be taken from Framework 7 in 2012, and another 360m euros in 2013, the Commission says. The proposal is an attempt to smooth things over with member states, which are refusing to front the cash needed to keep Iter going. The European contribution to the project is expected to more than double: from 2.7 billion euros agreed in 2006 to around 7bn euros by 2013.

During a Council meeting on 12 July the member states said they would not provide the extra money, and that it should come from the existing EU budget, primarily Framework 7. Europe needs to find an additional 1.4 billion euros to pay for Iter’s construction by 2013, meaning that just under 1bn euros will still have to be found somewhere.

Sparks finally fly at the LHC

Despite false starts and warm ups, the LHC, a project that began more than 20 years ago, has finally begun to take and analyse data and the champagne is flowing in celebration.

The experiments in the more than £6 billion project, based at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, CERN, saw collisions at a record energy of 7 tera electron volts (TeV) at 1pm today. In a “gentlemen’s draw” all four experiments appeared to see the particles smashing together and flying out into the detectors at the same time, as the magnets brought the beams together to collide.

Physicists were primed for action from 4am this morning, but the sensitive safety systems, installed in the wake of the machine’s breakdown in 2008, twice aborted the attempt and reset the system before collisions could get underway.

But finally, the moment of truth came on the third attempt. It was communicated to the untrained eye only through the huge cheers erupting from the various control rooms and collaborators across the world, all linked up by webcam. But by 10 minutes later the first visual displays of colliding particles emerged, showing spaghetti strings of flying particles, tracked within 3D images of the detectors.

CERN researchers are still walking around holding laptops showing such displays and cradling them like newborn babies. The director general of CERN has even been beamed in via videoconference from Japan where he says he is eating an evening meal of crisps and wine, proudly displaying a now empty bottle of 1991 vintage red, the year the LHC got its first official go ahead.

But as the head of the CMS experiment, Guido Tonelli, said in the CMS control room just a few moments ago, the celebrations will be quick because what they are marking is that operation is now underway and it’s time for the experiments to get on with what they were designed to do.

There are now around 50 collisions happening per second within the detectors. At seven times the energy of its nearest competitor - the Tevatron at Fermilab in Illinois, US - the LHC is now by far the highest energy accelerator in the world. But, having been running since 1983, Fermilab still wins in the amount of data collected - a crucial factor in finding some of the most highly sought after particles, including the Higgs boson.

The LHC will now run until it gathers one inverse femtobarn (a measurement of the number of particle collisions) and beats that record. This is foreseen for the end of 2011, when the machine will be shutdown for a year of upgrades before, more than likely, we’ll be back to do this all over again at the optimum energy of 14 TeV.

EPO election shambles

The European Patent Organisation has for the third time failed to elect a replacement for outgoing president, Alison Brimelow.

Despite the repeated failures, and the looming date of Brimelow’s departure, the EPO’s administrative council insists the next vote, to be held on 1 March, will use the same procedures and with the same pool of candidates.

Three candidates are still vying for the role: Susanne As Sivborg, director general of the Swedish Patent Office, Benoît Battistelli, director general of the French National Institute of Industrial Property and Roland Grossenbacher, director of the Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property.

Sivborg won a majority in the first vote in October, but not the 75 per cent of votes needed to win. The tables then turned in December when Battistelli had the majority of the 36 national patent offices behind him, but again not enough to win outright. News from the administrative council today is that round three of the election was once again a stalemate.

Jesper Kongstad, director general of the Danish Patent and Trademark Office, had been a fourth candidate but dropped out of the race after the second vote in December. Without new candidates, further drop-outs or some serious swings of allegiance, it’s getting harder to see how the administrative council will be able to come to an agreement.

The process to find a president began way back in July last year after Brimelow announced she would leave the institution on 30 June 2010, not completing her five-year term.

The lack of a president looks likely to affect the debate surrounding the EU Patent. The European Parliament will need the currently leaderless EPO’s input and impetus to drive the ambitious project forward.

Could the Extremely Large Telescope be built on European soil?

Jerzy Buzek, the president of the European Parliament, is backing plans to construct the European Extremely Large Telescope in the Canary Islands, Research Europe has learned.

Buzek will announce his support for the project on 3 February, paving the way for debates on whether the location for the 1 billion euro telescope should be chosen according scientific or socio-economic factors.

A European Southern Observatory team is currently considering a number of sites for the project, including the Canary Islands, home to the European Northern Observatory, and Chile, where ESO's Southern Observatory is based. The group is due to report back to the ESO council during its meeting in March, although some believe it is unlikely that a final decision will be made on the spot. Meanwhile, a delegation from the European Parliament is to visit the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on 19 February to learn more about the location.

Those backing the Canary Islands are likely to argue that the location provides tax benefits and presents an opportunity to develop the region. They may also suggest that the site is already fairly well prepared to host the 42 meter diameter segmented mirror project, whereas the Chile site might absorb more cash during the construction phase. The islands are already home to a number of astronomy projects, led by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias.

However, the Chilean side may equally argue that Europe has already spent a considerable amount of money in developing Chile as a base for its astronomy work and that the E-ELT would provide the perfect complement to existing instruments in the region.

Rows over the importance of socio-economic factors when choosing locations for European projects have arisen before, including that over the site for the European Spallation Source. This ultimately went to Lund in Sweden, despite competition from less developed regions, such as Debrecen in Hungary.

Some newer member states have lobbied for research infrastructures to be used as a means to develop their regions rather than locating them in areas that already host research facilities, even if they might offer a better scientific environment. Those backing La Palma will argue that the Canary Islands fits the bill in both respects.