Nuevos avances en el desarrollo de las actuaciones recogidas en el 'Memorando de Entendimiento' entre la Asociación Europea de Universidades y la Dirección General de Investigación

One of the important areas of EUA’s current work is consolidating the role of universities as key actors in European research and innovation and in delivering a strong European Research Area (ERA). For this reason, in July 2012, EUA signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the European Commission DG Research and Innovation, and a Joint Statement with the Commission and four other European stakeholder organisations (EARTO, LERU, NordForsk and Science Europe), committing the signatories to working in partnership towards achieving the ERA goals.

 

Photo © European Union, 2013: European Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, with EUA President Professor Helena NazaréActions taken by EUA in the context of the MoU concern topics where universities’ own initiatives are already helping to overcome the identified barriers and bottlenecks to achieving the ERA, and where EUA has been working with its membership to promote wider “take-up” and development of good practices already in place. These action lines, therefore, focus on issues such as doctoral training, research careers and mobility, university-industry collaboration, cross-border cooperation and the development of open access to publications and data.

Since the signing of the MoU last year EUA has been actively taking forward three priority action lines through a variety of initiatives. Following preparatory work within the EUA Council, the national rectors’ conferences and at the EUA Annual Conference in Ghent, EUA has recently disseminated questionnaires to its membership focusing on the identification and characterisation of institutional policies on doctoral training, research careers and mobility, and the national policy and legislative frameworks. The results of these questionnaires will not only develop EUA’s contribution to the dialogue with other stakeholders on the European Research Area policy implementation, but will also help EUA to further enhance its services to its membership. The surveys will be open until mid-June and we have encouraged and look forward to a good response from our members.

On the second priority action line on the topic of cross border cooperation and more specifically “smart specialisation strategies”, EUA held an expert meeting in partnership with the European Commission Joint Research Centre (IPTS, Seville, Spain) on 21 and 22 February. This event gathered experts from both universities and regional authorities to debate existing “good practices” and how universities could enhance their contribution in developing national and regional “Smart Specialisation Strategies” (S3) for future maximisation of the use of the EU regional funds for research and innovation activities.

EUA’s ambition through this MoU action is to take forward the outcomes of the Seville event to devise a set of new “guidelines” for regional-university cooperation in smart specialisation strategies for research and innovation (RIS3) with the objective to inform future policy development, and to raise the awareness of how best to take advantage of the synergies between the competitive funds through Horizon 2020 and the Structural and Cohesion Funds.

The third priority issue for MoU action is open access to scientific publications. EUA has established a small working group of experts whose members have provided input into recent stakeholder events organised within the framework of the ERA Joint Statement. For its part, EUA has proposed that the next step (to build upon common principles for open access that are now well-developed) should be the preparation of the ground for high-level talks with major publishing houses to explore “doable” business models and operational conditions for open access that meet universities’ needs. 

At its forthcoming meeting in June, the EUA Research Policy Working Group will review progress on its MoU actions in advance of EUA participating in a joint progress review meeting with other European Stakeholder Organisations planned for July in Brussels.

Más información aquí