RESEARCH: Plans for a European Research Area are well underway. But what exactly does that mean? The ERA is not just a political concept. It has to be a reality to deliver solutions for the future of all our citizens and for the future of the world

THE EU has big ambitions when it comes to the knowledge society. Efforts are underway to create an European Research Area (ERA) where scientific engagement between states is as seamless as in the US and where the big social problems of our times are being targeted collectively by Europe's scientists.

Ireland has an inside track on the ERA via the director general of Science Foundation Ireland (SFI). Prof Frank Gannon is one of 22 leading experts with a place on the ERA board, the body established a year ago to help deliver the ERA. In October the board submitted its first report on where we are with progress towards the nascent ERA.

Already the board is laying down markers on the ERA's agenda; how it should perform, what its budget should be and how we will know when it is in place by the planned target date of 2030. "It is all a part of what Europe should look like in 2030," Gannon says.

The ERA has been under active discussion for a number of years, but was first mooted as long ago as the 1970, Gannon says. He likens it to the much more readily understood "common market" which allows free movement of goods, services and people across EU borders. In the research context it would mean the free movement of researchers across EU countries, shared access to resources and a commonality of agendas. "It is making a single European Research Area where everyone thinks in a European context."

He acknowledges that it is "artificial to put boundaries around international science", and yet common thinking and common action is necessary to tackle the huge societal issues such as climate change, energy supply, Alzheimer's disease and the threat of world pandemics. "We need to get those problems solved, we need to get people working on them," he says. "Once you start to look at these societal needs you see the need for a ERA."

The board was put together to help map out how Europe is to achieve a working ERA by 2030, and its recent first report begins to indicate how we might get there. "This is an overall blueprint," he says. "We were asked to think aggressively."

With this in mind the board published a collection of targets under six key headings, indicating what a common research area would mean: the creation of an ERA; the solution of society's "Grand Challenges"; the interaction between science and society; the collaboration of public and private sectors in innovation; the encouragement of excellence and the promotion of cohesion.

The ERA will have been delivered if certain targets are met including: the EU's own Framework Programme research budget, not including military research, doubles to 10 per cent of total research spending within the Community; greater co-ordination of research across the ERA; much greater mobility of researchers across Europe with at least 20 per cent of doctoral candidates working outside of their home countries; and the creation of a single fiscal regime for research, development and innovation across the EU.

The board's first report includes more goals, many of them extremely ambitious. It wants a full one-third of all non-military research funding aimed at solving society's Grand Challenges and almost a third of all researchers, including humanities researchers, tackling these challenges.

The board calls for absolute gender balance to ensure women maintain their role in research and it wants 3.3 per cent of EU GDP to be spent on higher education. And it wants the Lisbon target of 3 per cent of GDP for research to be increased to five per cent.

The plan envisions the appointment of a chief scientific adviser who would become the public face of the ERA and hopefully a person to be trusted by the public. And it wants at least half of all research to be "frontier, high-risk" research.

The commercial edge is also there however with the availability of public/private risk capital for early stage technology development to reach the equivalent of 0.15 per cent of GDP.

The board harked back to European supremacy in science and research during the Renaissance, choosing to embed this in the report's title: "Preparing Europe for a New Renaissance - a Strategic View of the European Research Area".

European Commissioner for science and research Janez Potocnik picked up on this theme in his introduction to the report, describing how scholars and artists "moved relatively freely around Europe" during this intellectual rebirth starting in the late Middle Ages.

He believes there is a need for a "paradigm shift" in the way Europe conducts research, claiming that it is also beyond politics. "The ERA is not just a political concept. It has to be a reality to deliver solutions for the future of all our citizens and for the future of the world as we know it," he said.

Even so the political realities will intervene, including how individual states will engage with such an entity and achieve the board's ambitious targets on spending in light of the fiscal situation. "There are strategic and political choices that must be made," Gannon says.

Even so Ireland will have to engage with this grand project if it is to achieve a knowledge economy and aspire to world-class achievement in the sciences. "It means we have to be engaged," Gannon believes. "Ireland will be at the centre of Europe, making its contribution just as it does at the moment."