Open Innovation
Open Science
Open to the World– a vision for Europe

Research andInnovation

EUROPEAN COMMISSION
Directorate-General for Research and Innovation
Directorate A – Policy Development and Coordination
Unit A1 – Internal and external communication
Contact: Kevin Walsh
E-mail: Kevin.Walsh@ec.europa.eu
RTD-PUBLICATIONS@ec.europa.eu
European Commission
B-1049 Brussels

EUROPEAN COMMISSION

Open Innovation
Open Science
Open to the World– a vision for Europe

2016

Directorate-General for Research and Innovation

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TABLE OF CONTENTSFOREWORD
President Juncker ________________________________________________________________ 4
INTRODUCTION
Commissioner Moedas ___________________________________________________________ 6
OPEN INNOVATION________________________________________________________________ 9
OPEN SCIENCE__________________________________________________________________ 31
OPEN TO THE WORLD____________________________________________________________ 57
IMPLEMENTING THE THREE Os
Director-General Smits __________________________________________________________ 80
KEY SPEECHES__________________________________________________________________ 83
REFERENCES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS___________________________________________ 99

3

FOREWORD

4

Most of the political priorities set for my mandate as
President of the European Commission depend to agreater or lesser extent on research and innovation.
Research and innovation create investment
opportunities for new and better products andservices and therefore increase competitivenessand employment. This is why the Investment Planfor Europe through the European Fund for Strategic
Investments is investing so heavily in innovation
related projects and SMEs, over thirty billion euro
to date. I am also proud that the European Union
is increasing its financial commitment to researchand innovation funding through the Horizon 2020
programme and the European Structural andInvestment Funds.

across the Commission and improve interactions
between science and policy.
This publication shows how research and innovationis changing rapidly. Digital technologies are making
the conduct of science and innovation morecollaborative, more international and more open to
citizens. Europe must embrace these changes andreinforce its position as the leading continent forscience, for new ideas, and for investing sustainably
in the future.

Research and innovation is a key component ofthematic policies. It is central to the Digital Single
Market, both to enable industry to benefit fromdigital technologies and to underpin scientificadvance through the development of a European
Science Cloud. It is equally self-evident that Europe’s
ambitions on energy and on climate change will
depend, ultimately, on the development anddeployment of new, clean technologies.
Research and innovation can also contribute to theEuropean Union as a stronger Global Actor, as otherparts of the world seek to work with our leading
scientists and because scientific relations can flourish
even where international relations are strained.
Science more generally has a critical role across
many areas of policy in providing evidence thathelps understand the risks and benefits of different
policy choices. This is why I tasked Commissioner
Moedas to develop the Scientific Advice Mechanism
to strengthen the independence of scientific advice

Jean-Claude Juncker,
President of the European Commission.

5

INTRODUCTION
When I took office as European Commissioner for
research, science and innovation, it was important
to me to listen to and learn from Europe’s research,science and innovation communities. There are manythings that Europe does extremely well, such as theEuropean Research Council which, in a few shortyears, has put in place a unique way of supporting thevery best science in Europe. However, it also became
apparent to me that the way that science works isfundamentally changing and an equally importanttransformation is taking place in how companies andsocieties innovate. Put simply, the advent of digitaltechnologies is making science and innovation more
open, collaborative, and global.
These exchanges led me to set three goals for
EU research and innovation policy, which I have6

summarised as Open Innovation, Open Scienceand Open to the World. These goals, first set out ina speech I gave in June 2015, show how researchand innovation contribute across the European
Commission’s political priorities. They do not represent
a new policy initiative or funding programme as such,
but a way to reinforce existing programmes, such as
Horizon 2020, and reinvigorate existing policies suchas the European Research Area.
This book brings together some of the key conceptual
insights behind Open Innovation, Open Scienceand Open to the World and highlights actions thatare already taking place or are being prepared. For
example, the Open Innovation goal has led to adebate on a possible European Innovation Council
and the creation of a Seal of Excellence to facilitate
links between Horizon 2020 and other funding
programmes. The Open Science goal is materialisingin the development of a European Science Cloud andgreater openness to scientific data generated by
Horizon 2020 projects. The Commission has alreadytaken historic steps to be Open to the World by signing
Association Agreements with Ukraine and Tunisia to
Horizon 2020, as well as international agreementswith China and South American countries.
As set out in the chapter on Open Innovation, Europe is
excelling at many things, but we are not good enoughat investing in innovation at speed and scale. This is
why Open Innovation is the first goal. Europe has great
diversity and is well placed to succeed in the next
wave of innovation that will be found at the interfaces
between digital, physical and biological technologies,
between the arts, business and science, and between
data, users and organisations. Innovators do not needhelp from the EU to come up with great ideas, but
the level of success their ideas can ultimately reachis certainly influenced by regulation, financing, public
support and market access. The EU is playing a crucialrole in improving all these success factors.

Europe is the world’s largest producer of knowledge,
but the phenomenon described in the chapter
on Open Science is changing every aspect of thescientific method to become more open, inclusive
and interdisciplinary. If scientists want to monitor theeffects of climate change on local ecosystems, forexample, they can now use citizen reporting or datafrom smartphones. Ensuring Europe is at the forefrontof Open Science means promoting open access toscientific data and publications alongside the highest
standards of research integrity.
There are few forces in this world as engaging
and unifying as science. The universal language ofscience maintains open channels of communication
where other foreign policy approaches are not viable.
The chapter ‘Open to the World’ sets out the gains
the EU can make by maintaining its presence at thehighest level of international scientific endeavour
and through promoting our competitive edge inglobal knowledge markets in the information age.
I hope that the ideas and initiatives described in thisbook will stimulate anyone interested in European
research and innovation. I would like it to encourage
debate and lead to new ideas on what the European
Union should do, should not do, or do differently.
This book would not have been possible without
the dedication and knowledge of the staff in the
Directorate-General for Research and Innovation in
the European Commission and I would like to thankeveryone who contributed with their hard work,
discussions and enthusiasm.

Carlos Moedas,
Commissioner for Research,
Science and Innovation.

7

OpenInnovation

OPEN INNOVATIONThe European Union is a research powerhouse, still
the world’s leading producer of scientific knowledge,
ahead of the United States. However, Europe too
rarely succeeds in turning research into innovation,in getting research results to market. Too often,
new technologies that have been developed inEurope are commercialised elsewhere.
Europe must get better at making the most of its
innovation talent, and that’s where Open Innovation
comes into play. This chapter describes theinitiatives that the Commission is taking and willtake to create an Open Innovation ecosystem
where innovation can flourish.
But, first, what is meant by Open Innovation? The
basic premise of Open Innovation is to open up
the innovation process to all active players sothat knowledge can circulate more freely andbe transformed into products and services thatcreate new markets, fostering a stronger cultureof entrepreneurship.
Open Innovation was defined by Henry Chesbrough1
as the “use of purposive inflows and outflows of1

knowledge to accelerate internal innovation”. Thisoriginal notion of Open Innovation was largely
based on transferring knowledge, expertise and evenresources from one company or research institution
to another. This assumes that firms can and should
use external ideas as well as internal ideas, andinternal and external paths to market, as they seek
to improve their performance (see Figure OI.1).
The concept of Open Innovation is constantly
evolving and is moving from linear, bilateraltransactions and collaborations towards dynamic,
networked, multi-collaborative innovation
ecosystems; a trend that was recognised by an
Independent Expert Group on Knowledge Transfer
and Open Innovation, set up by DG Researchand Innovation in 2012 (see Figure OI.2 on
Open Innovation mechanisms).
This means that a specific innovation can no longer
be seen as the result of predefined and isolated
innovation activities but rather as the outcomeof a complex co-creation process involving
knowledge flows across the entire economic andsocial environment.

Chesbrough, Henry (2006) http://openinnovation.net/Book/NewParadigm/
Chapters/index.html; “Open Innovation: A New Paradigm for Understanding
Industrial Innovation,” in Henry Chesbrough, Wim Vanhaverbeke, and Joel
West, eds. http://hchesbrough.wpengine.com/NewParadigm” Open Innovation:
Researching a New Paradigm. Oxford: Oxford University Press

11

Figure OI.1: Contrasting Principles of Closed and Open Innovation
CLOSED INNOVATION PRINCIPLESOPEN INNOVATION PRINCIPLES

The smart people in our field work for us.

Not all the smart people work for us. We need towork with smart people inside and outside ourcompany.

To profit from R&D, we must discover it, develop it,
and ship it ourselves.

External R&D can create significant value; internal
R&D is needed to claim some portion of that value.

If we discover it ourselves, we will get it to market
first.

We don’t have to originate the research to profit
from it.

The company that gets an innovation to market
first will win.

Building a better business model is better thangetting to market first.

If we create the most and the best ideas in theindustry, we will win.

If we make the best use of internal and external
ideas, we will win.

We should control our IP, so that our competitors
don’t profit from our ideas.

We should profit from others’ use of our IP, andwe should buy others’ IP whenever it advances
our own business model.

Source: Table I-1 from Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Proﬁting from Technology by Henry
Chesbrough (Harvard Business Review Press, 2005)

This co-creation takes place in different parts of
the innovation ecosystem and requires knowledge
exchange and absorptive capacities from all theactors involved, whether businesses, academia,
financial institutions, public authorities or citizens.

Figure OI.2: Open Innovation mechanisms• ACQUISITIONS• SHORT TERM FELLOWSHIPS• SPINNING IN• VENTURING• USER DRIVEN INNOVATIONS• INNOVATION DRIVEN BY
SUPPLIER/COMPETITORS

DE

T
OU
• LICENSING OUT• DIVESTMENTS• R&D FOR OTHER COMPANIES• SPINNING OUT

CO
U

DE
SI • LICENSING IN

INS
I

OU
T

IN

ED
PL

SSES
OCE
PR
• ALLIANCES• COOPERATION• JOINT VENTURE• JOINT R&D• CO CREATION

Source: DG Research and Innovation, Knowledge Transfer and Open Innovation Study (on-going)121. OPEN INNOVATION – THE CONCEPT IN EVOLUTIONOpen Innovation is a broad term, which encompasses
several different nuances and approaches. Two mainelements underpin the most recent conceptions ofOpen Innovation, for which academics have coined
the term Open Innovation 2.02:
1. the users are in the spotlight: an invention
becomes an innovation only if users become apart of the value creation process (see FigureOI.3). Notions such as ‘user innovation’, ascoined by Eric von Hippel3, emphasize the roleof citizens and users in the innovation processes
as ‘distributed’ sources of knowledge. Thiskind of public engagement is one of the aimsof the Responsible Research and Innovation4
programme in Horizon 2020. The term ‘open’in these contexts have also been used as asynonym for ‘user-centric’;5

2. creating a well-functioning eco-system thatallows co-creation becomes essential forOpen Innovation. In this eco-system relevant
stakeholders are collaborating along andacross industry and sector-specific value chains
to co-create solutions to socio-economic andbusiness challenges. This co-creation process
should join forces at the EU, Member State andregional level.6
One important element to keep in mind when
discussing Open Innovation is that it cannot be
defined in absolutely precise terms. It may be betterto think of it as a point on a continuum: there is arange of context-dependent innovation activities
at different stages, from research, to development
through to commercialisation, where some activities
are more open than others7.

Figure OI.3: From Knowledge Transfer to Open Innovation 2.0

Knowledge Transfer

Outside inOpen Innovation

CoupledOpen Innovation 2.0

Inside out

User, ECO-System

Source: DG Research and Innovation, Knowledge Transfer and Open Innovation Study (on-going)

Independent Expert Group Report on Open Innovation & Knowledge
Transfer, Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, 2014; Cf. also
Open Innovation Strategy and Policy Group (OISPG).
3
Cf e.g. E. von Hippel, “Democratizing Innovation”, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2005.
4
https://ec.europa.eu/research/swafs/pdf/pub_public_engagement/
responsible-research-and-innovation-leaflet_en.pdf
5
H. Chesbrough and M. Bogers, “Explicating Open Innovation: Clarifying an
Emerging Paradigm for Understanding Innovation”, in Henry Chesbrough,Wim Vanhaverbeke and Joel West, eds. New Frontiers in Open Innovation,
Oxford University Press, 2014
2

Independent Expert Group Report on Open Innovation & Knowledge Transfer,
Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, 20147
L. Dahlander and D. Gann, “How open is innovation?”, Research Policy 39,
2010
6

13

Open Innovation is gaining momentum thanks to
new large-scale trends such as digitalisation and themass participation and collaboration in innovationthat it enables. The speed and scale of digitalisation
are accelerating and transforming the way wedesign, develop and manufacture products, the way
we deliver services, and the products and services
themselves. It is enabling new innovation processes
and new ways of doing business, introducing new
cross-sector value chains and infrastructures.
Europe must ensure that it capitalises on the benefits
that these developments promise for citizens interms of tackling societal challenges and boosting
business and industry. Drawing on these trends, andwith the aim of helping build an Open Innovation
ecosystem in Europe, the European Commission’s
concept of Open Innovation is characterised by:14•• combining the power of ideas and knowledge
from different actors (whether private, public
or civil society/third sector) to co-create new
products and find solutions to societal needs;•• creating shared economic and social value,
including a citizen and user-centric approach;•• capitalising on the implications of trends
such as digitalisation, mass participation andcollaboration.
The practical steps that the Commission will take tocreate a European Open Innovation ecosystem aregrouped in three broad areas or pillars, described
below in the section Open Innovation in the New
Commission Priorities.

Open Innovation Platforms
There are many examples of successful Open Innovation platforms in Europe, with different
models for supporting Open Innovation either in more conceptual or more practical ways. The
following are just two among many such examples.
The Demola platform (www.demola.net) is an international organization that facilitates cocreation projects between university students, companies and researchers, both locally andinternationally. Demola is a co-creation concept that is geared to solving real challenges. Every
project has an outcome – be it a new concept, a demo, or a prototype. If the partner company
finds the outcome useful, the company can license or purchase the outcome, and take it for
further development. Each partner has a clear role, and the work is guided by simple procedures.
Contracts, intellectual property rights, licensing models, and other legal requirements are in placeand meet international business standards and practices.
High Tech Campus Eindhoven (www.hightechcampus.com) in the Netherlands brings together
more than 140 companies, startups and institutes. Some 10,000 researchers, developers andentrepreneurs are working on developing future technologies and products that will affect the
lives of billions of people. The ecosystem of open innovation helps Campus-based companies toaccelerate innovation, by offering easy access to high tech facilities and international networks.
Campus companies (including Philips, NXP, IBM and Intel) strategically decide what knowledge,
skills and R&D facilities they share in order to achieve faster, better and more customer-oriented
innovation in the fields of health, energy and smart environments. High Tech Campus Eindhoven
reports that Campus companies are responsible for nearly 40% of all Dutch patent applications.

2. THE LINK TO OPEN SCIENCE AND OPEN TO THE WORLD
In order to encourage the transition from linear
knowledge transfer towards more dynamic
knowledge circulation, experts8 agree that it isessential to create and support an (open) innovation
ecosystem that facilitates the translation ofknowledge into socio-economic value.

Open Access to research results, an essential partof Open Science, which aims to make science morereliable, efficient and responsive, is therefore thespringboard for increased innovation opportunities,
for instance by enabling more science-based startups to emerge.

In addition to the formal supply side elements
such as research skills, excellent science, funding
and Intellectual Property management, there isalso a need to concentrate on the demand side
aspects of knowledge circulation, making sure thatscientific work corresponds to the needs of theusers and that knowledge is findable, accessible,
interpretable and re-usable (FAIR).

As noted by Chesbrough9, prioritising Open Science
does not, however, automatically ensure that
research results and scientific knowledge arecommercialised or transformed into socio-economic
value. In order for this to happen, Open Innovationmust help to connect and exploit the results ofOpen Science and facilitate the faster translation of
discoveries into societal use and economic value.

8

Independent Expert Group Report on Open Innovation & Knowledge Transfer,
Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, 2014

9

H. Chesbrough, From Open Science to Open Innovation, Science|Business
Publishing 2015, http://www.sciencebusiness.net/eventsarchive/OpenScience/15

Collaborations with international partners
represent important sources of knowledge
circulation. The globalisation of research andinnovation is not a new phenomenon but it has
intensified in the last decade, particularly in termsof collaborative research, international technology
production and worldwide mobility of researchers
and innovative entrepreneurs.

International collaboration plays a significant
role both in improving the competitiveness ofOpen Innovation ecosystems and in fostering new
knowledge production worldwide. It ensures accessto a broader set of competences, resources andskills wherever they are located, and it yields positive
impacts in terms of scientific quality and research
results. It enables global standard-setting, allows
global challenges to be tackled more effectively, andfacilitates participation in global value chains and new
and emerging markets.

An example of Open Innovation in automated transport
Today, a number of prototype automated vehicles and transport systems exist in various stagesof development.
In terms of transportation systems, the automated ones currently in operation function within
the comfortable confines of dedicated, protected infrastructure. The CityMobil2 project fundedby the 7th Framework Programme seeks to take this to the next level, with automated transportsystems using the existing road infrastructure. Systems like this can provide transport on demand
for areas with low demand for conventional transportation.
The four-year project aims to demonstrate that automated systems are viable transport options
for outlying urban areas and small towns. With 45 partners drawn from system suppliers, publicauthorities, the research community and networking organisations, CityMobil2 has procured thetechnology required to demonstrate that automated transportation is feasible. This includes
the EasyMile EZ-10, a self-driving electric car which is not only ideal for the transportation ofpassengers, but can also be adapted for logistical and freight use. Partly thanks to the project twocompanies created the EasyMile joint venture which produced the first automated road transport
vehicle on an industrial scale.
CityMobil2 is also studying the long-term socio-economic, environmental, cultural and behaviouralramifications of automated transportation. The resulting analyses of these and the technicalaspects of the project will be used to plot possible future courses and define different possible
scenarios for automated transport.

16

3. OPEN INNOVATION IN THE NEW COMMISSION PRIORITIESHow can the concept of Open Innovation be translated
into efficient and effective policies? As stated in thepolitical priorities of Commissioner Moedas10, creating
and supporting an Open Innovation ecosystem
encourages dynamic knowledge circulation andfacilitates the translation of that knowledge into
socio-economic value.

The ecosystem underpinningOpen Innovation: the importance of
creating the right framework conditions
Figure OI.4 shows how the main elements of
the innovation ecosystem contribute to fostering
Open Innovation. The public sector, the financial
sector, innovative businesses, academia and citizens
all have an essential part to play in delivering on thethree pillars of the European Commission’s approach
to Open Innovation.

Figure OI.4: The roles of the different actors in Open Innovation
THE PUBLIC SECTOR
The public sector has a central role to play in promoting
Open Innovation. First and foremost it creates the regulatoryenvironment in which all other actors operate. It puts in place rules
and tools that can incentivise an open circulation of knowledge
and cooperation among different actors with the aim to develop
and market innovative solutions. Secondly, it offers better modesof coordination among the economic actors involved in order toenhance productivity and value. Thirdly, it can create a demand forinnovation, both through the above-mentioned regulatory means
and, for instance, through the procurement of innovative solutions.

THE FINANCIAL SECTOR
Innovation can be a risky business, therefore accessing funding
and / or finance is not always easy for those who have innovativeideas. Building more innovation-friendly financial instruments andinstitutions and promoting the integration of existing funds andtools is essential to support Open Innovation. It is important thatinvestors of all kinds find their interest in investing in innovation.

INNOVATIVE BUSINESSES
Businesses play a key role in innovating. In order to be able to bringinnovations to the market, they must be able to maximise theirreturns on the resources allocated to innovating. This is the reason
why it is important to reduce European market fragmentation, while
fostering faster market access and development.

CITIZENS
Citizens, users and Civil Society
Organisations have a central andtransversal role to play in bringing
innovation to the market. They createa demand for innovative products andservices, they can fund and / or financeprojects that are relevant to them, they
can be at the source of innovative ideas
worth spreading and scaling up andthey can have a say in what researchis meaningful to them and can impact
their lives.

ACADEMIA
Universities, Higher Education Institutions, and Public Research
Organisations / Research and Technology Organisations havea key role to play in the innovation eco-system, not only asknowledge producers, but also as co-creators and generators ofskilled human capital. Challenges in this component of the ecosystem include the co-creation capabilities of universities, thedesign of incentives for academics when working with users andthe absorptive capacity of academic knowledge within firms.
10

http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_SPEECH-15-5243_en.htm

17

The Commission aims to ensure that the appropriate
framework conditions for innovation are in placethrough the three pillars of its Open Innovation
policy. These are: Reforming the Regulatory
Environment, Boosting Private Investment andMaximising Impacts.
First, Europe needs to create the right regulatoryenvironment that removes obstacles to innovationand encourages innovators and entrepreneurs, while
rule and standard-setting must keep up with rapidlychanging technologies. Fewer regulatory barriers will
help encourage more investment in innovation, butmuch more needs to be done. This brings us to thesecond pillar: comparing the levels of investmentin the EU and the US, it’s clear that the European
innovation ecosystem is lacking adequate private
financial instruments (with far less venture capitalin Europe, and venture capital funds do not have thescale or scope to grow companies).
Under the third pillar, the Commission will strive to
get the most out of EU-level support for innovation
by developing new actions to get more innovation
impact out of Horizon 2020, including through bettersynergies with the Structural Funds.
The three pillars, and examples of specific actions
under each one, are synthesised in Figure OI.5 anddiscussed in more detail below.

Figure OI.5: The Commission’s three pillars of action

TION ECOSYST
OVA
EM
INN

PUBLICSECTOR••••

BUSINESSESCITIZENS

ACADEMIAPILLAR 1

PILLAR 2

Reforming theRegulatory
Environment

Boosting Private
Investment in
Research &Innovation• Scientific Advice
Mechanism• InnovRefit• Innovation Deals• Policy Support
Facility

18

FINANCE• European Fundof Funds• Maximise use of
EFSIPILLAR 3
Maximising
impacts• Seal of Excellence• European Innovation
Council• Merge digital into
thematic priorities(health, energy,
food, water)• Horizon 2020: 2nd wave
of simplification

PILLAR 1
REFORMING THE REGULATORYENVIRONMENT“We need to tear down the regulatory barriers that hamper innovation. We needa better regulatory environment that creates an appetite among private investors
to invest in Europe. That’s no easy feat – legislative processes can take several
years to adapt to new technologies that are evolving every month. That’s why
I have made smart regulation part of my priority Open Innovation, and why I
appreciate that the Dutch Presidency has put this high on the list of its own
priorities for research and innovation.”
Commissioner Carlos Moedas,
Informal Competitiveness Council, Amsterdam, 27 January 2016

The pillar on Reforming the Regulatory Environmentis about ensuring that regulations are not an obstacle
to innovation and that, whenever possible, they
support it. To achieve this, it is essential to identify
the ways in which regulation affects all elements ofthe eco-system and their interactions. The following
sections describe initiatives that the Commission isdeveloping or exploring to help reform and improve
the regulatory environment in favour of innovation.

the Commission’s in-house scientific service, and ofexisting specialist committees.

Scientific Advice Mechanism

Following President Juncker’s declaration in
May 2015 to set up a new scientific advice structure,
Commissioner Moedas and the Directorate-Generalfor Research and Innovation established SAM as
quickly as possible.

Scientific evidence is at the very heart of theCommission’s goal of better regulation. It is forthis reason that the Commission has created theScientific Advice Mechanism (SAM) to provide highquality, timely and independent scientific advice forits policy-making activities. This will help improve
the quality of EU legislation, in line with the
Better Regulation agenda. The creation of a better
regulatory environment is an essential componentof the Commission’s Open Innovation agenda, towhich SAM will make a vital contribution.
SAM is a system that brings together evidence andinsight from different disciplines and approaches,taking into consideration the specificities of
EU policy making, and ensuring transparency. It willcomplement the work of the Joint Research Centre,

SAM will have a structured relationship with scientificadvisory bodies, within the Member States and more
widely. In particular, there will be close interaction
with the European scientific academies, who will playa key role in providing the best scientific evidence
needed for the EU policy-making process.

The core of SAM is the High Level Group of seven
Scientific Advisors. They were appointed in November
2015 following an open call for nominations and therecommendations of an independent identificationcommittee. The first meeting of the High Level Group
took place in January 2016.
The Commission is committed to ensuring SAM’s
success, and committed to establishing closer links
between science and policy-making. The ultimate
aim is to deliver better, evidence-based policies
for Europe that will contribute to solving global
challenges in a consensual way.

19

The seven members of the first SAM High Level Group

Janusz M. Bujnicki

Professor, Head of the Laboratory of Bioinformatics and Protein
Engineering, International Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology,
Warsaw

Pearl Dykstra

Professor of Sociology, Erasmus University, Rotterdam

Elvira Fortunato

Professor, Materials Science Department of the Faculty of Science andTechnology, NOVA University, Lisbon

Rolf-Dieter Heuer

President of the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft

Julia Slingo

Chief Scientist, Met Office, Exeter

Cédric Villani

Director, Henri Poincaré Institute, Paris

Henrik C. Wegener

Executive Vice-President, Chief Academic Officer and Provost, Technical
University of Denmark

Source: https://ec.europa.eu/research/sam/index.cfm

InnovRefit
Europe is lagging behind major competitors
in the levels of private investment in R&D.
More appropriate framework conditions could
both maximise the impact of public spending

and increase the incentives for private sector
investment. Getting the regulatory frameworkright is crucially important to getting innovative
products and services to market and to allowing
innovators to benefit from the scale and scope of
the Single Market.

Health technology assessment for pharmaceuticals – an example of better
regulation for healthThe price and reimbursement of medicines is largely defined by the health technology assessment(HTA) process, performed by independent agencies that analyse the medical, economic, socialand ethical implications of the value, effectiveness, costs and impact of a health intervention.
With some 50 national or regional HTA agencies in Europe carrying out assessments individually,
fragmentation is high. Due to the limited standardisation and coordination of HTA in Europe,
healthcare manufacturers need to address multiple stakeholders and systems with varying
requirements, in order for patients to access their products in the different national markets.
The varying HTA results between countries also raise the question of objectivity and accuracyof assessments, which are necessary to reward developers for true innovation. The Commission
has launched initiatives aimed at improving cooperation between HTA agencies at European
level. Their results will serve as a basis for possible decisions regarding pathways to an improved
coordination and mutualisation of the work of national or regional HTA agencies, thereby
potentially facilitating pharmaceutical innovation in the EU.

20

In December 2015 the Commission published its
report Better regulations for innovation-driven
investments at EU level11. This document presented,
for the first time, an in-depth analysis of how theregulatory environment at EU level can hamper, or
stimulate, innovation. It was developed following
consultations with Member States and a rangeof organisations and industry stakeholders. The
information gathered and its analysis by theCommission provide an evidence base of casestudies across different sectors and a springboard to
discussion and action at political level.
The Commission, together with the rotating
Presidencies of the Council, will continue to develop thispreliminary analysis and collect further suggestions on
the relationship between innovation and regulation,
indications of regulatory barriers to innovation andsuggestions for simpler, clearer and more efficientregulation that supports growth and jobs.

“We need to work to improve the framework conditions for innovation. Therefore,
we are investigating how to combine the large scale demonstration projects withregulatory innovation. For example, building on experiences in some Member
States, we could envisage allocating a space within large-scale demonstration
projects to stress-test regulatory frameworks in a practical manner.
The ‘regulatory innovation space’ would only apply to the demonstration or
testing phase, not to the further roll-out of solutions, but it would clarify where
the regulatory framework may require evolution in order to promote workable
solutions. Investing in work programmes, removing barriers − these are essential
steps, but they are only the tip of the iceberg. The Commission is doing a lot
more and I’m glad to have you with us on this journey.”
Commissioner Carlos Moedas,“Key challenges for the water sector”, European Parliament, Brussels, 20 April 2015

Innovation Deals
Timing is crucial for innovation. Existing regulations
may not be able to keep up with rapid technologicaland systemic change and ever-quicker timescales
for developing and introducing innovations.
Innovators may find themselves hindered in bringing
new and promising solutions to market. Innovations
with valuable socio-economic or environmental
potential may be delayed or impeded.
In order to avoid such unintended consequencesof EU regulation, the Commission is exploring
the idea of making it possible for innovators toquestion EU rules that are identified as posing
obstacles to innovation. This would be done jointly
11

http://ec.europa.eu/research/innovation-union/pdf/innovrefit_staff_working_document.pdf#view=fit&pagemode=none

with the competent EU, and possibly also national,
authorities through ‘Innovation Deals’, which
would be a new way of addressing EU regulatory
obstacles to innovation in a pragmatic, open andtransparent way.
Innovation Deals would be a form of voluntarycooperation between innovators, national, regional
and local authorities and the Commission. The idea
is to bring together innovators and regulators sothat they reach a common understanding of how a
specific innovation can be introduced within existing
regulatory frameworks. The Deals in themselves
would be an innovation in how the Commission
works, helping form a more modern and responsive
administration, in line with the Commission’s Better
Regulation Agenda12.
12

http://ec.europa.eu/smart-regulation/index_en.htm

21

Innovation Deals would be available for innovations
that are recently on the market or have only limited
or no market access. They should not contraveneor derogate from existing EU legislation, but clarify
possible “grey zones” or may make use of theflexibility permitted by different types of legislation,
eventually leading to the testing or applicationof the innovative solutions without infringing or
jeopardising any fundamental environmental,social or competition principles.
The Commission is launching a first pilot of theInnovation Deals in the area of the Circular Economy.
An open invitation will ask innovators to identify
where they think EU regulatory frameworks areblocking their innovations. The innovations addressed
will need to be genuinely new and meet or surpassthe overall objectives of the legislation fully. For
example, they could be innovative ways to recover

resources from waste water, or the use of newtechnologies to achieve waste recycling targets. The
Commission will select the innovations that are most
relevant at EU level: working with the innovator andnational authorities to improve legislative clarity; or
to identify and apply existing flexibility, while fullycomplying with legislative requirements.
The outcome of an Innovation Deal would bea clarification of how the EU rule or legislation
applies, together with better guidance on its
intention, through a better cooperation between
innovators and institutions in order to demonstrate
how the solution could be implemented. If theexistence of a regulatory obstacle is confirmed asa barrier to an innovation that could bring wider
benefits, the European Commission services may
consider beginning the process to amend therelevant legislation.

AMCARE – An example of Open Innovation in health
The AMCARE project, funded by the 7th framework Programme for Research, represents a majorinterdisciplinary effort between stem cell biologists, experts in advanced drug delivery, researchscientists, clinicians and research companies working together to develop new ways to address
the challenges of treating acute heart disease. The researchers will use adult stem cell therapy
with smart biomaterials and advanced drug delivery and combine such treatments with minimallyinvasive surgical devices. The project represents a multi-stakeholder approach and is truly co-creativein the spirit of Open Innovation. It facilitates the translation of research knowledge into something of
genuine socio-economic value and may represent a significant evolution in cardiac treatment. The
Open Innovation seen in the project has already been so successful that a number of the existing
partners have since begun another project to revolutionise the treatment of other diseases.

Horizon 2020 Policy Support Facility
The Horizon 2020 Policy Support Facility (PSF) wasestablished in March 2015 to offer Member States
and countries associated to Horizon 2020 practicalsupport to design, implement and evaluate policy

22

reforms that enhance the quality of their researchand innovation investments and national systems.
Such reforms concern, for example, the stimulationof stronger and closer links between science andbusiness or the introduction of performance-based
funding of public research institutes.

“Sometimes a fresh look, a different perspective, is what you need to get themost out of your national system… The Policy Support Facility is voluntary andprovides a broad range of services. What sets the PSF apart is that we listen towhat Member States want. What has been delivered is tailor-made advice that
purely acts on the requests of the Member States. Timing, political commitment,
scope and many more elements are adjusted according to national needs.”
Commissioner Carlos Moedas, Promoting research and innovation reforms through the Policy
Support Facility, Sofia, 8 October 2015

The Horizon 2020 PSF is a demand-driven service
that responds to requests from national authorities
on a voluntary basis. It provides independent highlevel expertise and analyses through a broad rangeof services such as peer reviews of national researchand innovation systems, support for specific reforms
and project-based mutual learning exercises. In
addition, the PSF provides a Knowledge Centre witha website13 with comprehensive information andanalysis on research and innovation performanceand policy responses in each Member State.
Three pilot PSF activities were launched in 2015: apeer review of the Bulgarian research and innovation
system14, a pre-peer review of the Hungarian
research and innovation system15 and a mutual
learning exercise on policies to foster businessresearch and innovation investments. A number of
new activities have been foreseen for 2016.
The Horizon 2020 Policy Support Facility supports smart
policy reforms including ones to improve the regulatoryenvironment to make it more innovation-friendly; tostimulate business engagement with and investments
in research and innovation; and to maximise the impactof research and innovation investments.

PILLAR 2
BOOSTING PRIVATE INVESTMENT INRESEARCH AND INNOVATIONThis pillar is about ensuring access to finance forinnovative ideas, creating better conditions for theprivate sector to invest in innovation activities andbringing together investors throughout Europe tobetter exploit the potential of the Single Market tofinance innovation. The following section discusses
the policy measures to be taken by the Commission.
The European Venture Capital Fund of Funds
Venture capital (VC) supports businesses as they
start up and grow. VC is particularly importantfor innovative companies in sectors such as life
sciences, clean technology and ICT. Firms with
VC backing are more likely to bring innovations
to market, generate patents and other forms ofintellectual property, show higher productivity,
grow faster, and become more competitive thantheir peers without venture capital.
However, VC in Europe is over-dependent on funding
from public sources, which account for over 30%
of total fund-raising. Large institutional investors
mention two main reasons for their reluctance toinvest more substantial amounts in European VC:
European VC funds are usually too small to accept
the large sums these investors want to invest, andreturns on investments are inadequate.

https://rio.jrc.ec.europa.eu/
https://rio.jrc.ec.europa.eu/en/library/horizon-2020-policy-support-facilitypeer-review-bulgarian-research-and-innovation-system
15
https://rio.jrc.ec.europa.eu/en/library/horizon-2020-policy-support-facilitypre-peer-review-hungarian-research-and-innovation
13
14

23

24

A pan-European VC Fund-of-Funds (FoF) could help
overcome these obstacles. If large enough, it could
accept large private-sector investments, and could alsooffer a better rate of return by diversifying the range of
VC funds into which these investments are channelled.
This is why the European Commission is currently
considering how best to set up one or more VC Fundof-Funds. Such a Fund-of-Funds would be managed
by a high-level manager selected through an open
and competitive call for expression of interest.
Maximising the use of the European
Fund for Strategic Investments (EFSI)The European Fund for Strategic Investments (EFSI)16
aims to overcome the current investment gap in the
EU by mobilising private funding both for strategic
investments in infrastructure and innovation andalso for risk finance for small businesses. The
European Commission expects EFSI to mobilise atleast EUR 315 billion in additional investments in
Europe by 2018.
EFSI has two parts: an Infrastructure / Innovation
Window aiming for EUR 240 billion of investments,
implemented by the EIB; and an SME Window aiming
for EUR 75 billion of investments, implemented by
the European Investment Fund (EIF).
Research, development and innovation (RDI) is
one of the priority sectors targeted by EFSI, andHorizon 2020 has contributed to the financingof the EU guarantee through a redeployment of
EUR 2.2 billion from its budget. The first results
achieved through EFSI’s support for RDI are very
promising, especially for innovative SMEs and small
midcaps via EFSI’s SME Window.

16

Indeed, the EFSI SME window has significantly
boosted support for technology and industrial
innovation. The requirement is to target funds that
focus on innovative SMEs and midcaps. By the endof 2015, 45 equity funds had been supported witha total EFSI / EIB investment of EUR 1.4 billion andmobilised investments estimated at EUR 14.5 billion,
all for research and innovation.
Also, frontloading by EFSI of Horizon 2020’s ‘InnovFin
SME Guarantee’ facility, where demand is far greaterthan anticipated, had resulted by the end of 2015 in
the signature of 21 guarantee or counter-guarantee
schemes with banks and other lenders. This involves
EFSI support of EUR 245 million, an expected totalloans volume of around EUR 2.5 billion, and estimatedmobilised investments of some EUR 3.9 billion, again
all for innovative SMEs and small midcaps.
Looking at EFSI’s Infrastructure / Innovation Window,
42 projects had been approved by the end of 2015
for an aggregate amount of EFSI finance of almost
EUR 5.7 billion (very largely for loans), which is
expected to mobilise more than EUR 25 billion of
investments. Four projects are in the research andinnovation sector priority and up to 21 more have astrong research and innovation component.
InnovFin is the new generation of EU financial
instruments and advisory services that was launched by
the European Commission, under Horizon 2020, and the
EIB and EIF to help innovative firms access financing for
research and innovation more easily. It is expected thatthe wide range of InnovFin debt and equity products onoffer will make more than EUR 24 billion available tosmall, medium and large companies and the promotersof research infrastructures. This financing is expected
to support up to EUR 48 billion of final research andinnovation investments.

http://ec.europa.eu/priorities/jobs-growth-and-investment/investment-plan_en

25

PILLAR 3

that the Commission intends to tackle, including
through the following initiatives.

MAXIMISING IMPACTS
Seal of Excellence
In order to maximise the impact of EU policies,
research and innovation programmes (including
Horizon 2020) and other public funding sources, it isessential to simplify and create synergies between
them so that excellent projects can access funding
from different sources more easily. Identifying thebest innovations to fund is also one of the challenges

The Seal of Excellence17, launched by Commissioners
Moedas and Cretu at the end of 2015, is a quality
label awarded to project proposals submitted forfunding under Horizon 2020 that succeeded inpassing all of the selection and award criteria but
which could not be funded with the available budget.

“The idea is very simple. Every year the Commission receives thousands ofproposals that are submitted to Horizon 2020. All of these proposals are
subject to a rigorous evaluation by independent experts. Only those thatpass this evaluation are recommended for funding. Horizon 2020 is highly
competitive. Unfortunately, many of these excellent proposals do not get
funded by Horizon 2020 due to the limited budget available. The Seal of
Excellence will be awarded to these excellent, but unfunded, proposals. This willallow other funding bodies to benefit from the Horizon 2020 evaluation results.
As a pilot phase, the ‘Seal of Excellence’ will start with the Horizon 2020 SME
Instrument. As the name implies, this is specifically designed for SMEs todevelop, test and produce innovative products and services.
We are launching a ‘Community of Practice’ with managing authorities and otherfunding bodies to build experience in implementing the ‘Seal of Excellence’.”Commissioner Carlos Moedas,
Ensuring Opportunity for All: Launch of the Seal of Excellence, Brussels, 12 October 2015

The Seal identifies promising project proposals andrecommends them for funding from alternative
sources, whether public or private, national,
regional, European or international. The Seal of
Excellence is a concrete example of moving fromsynergies in theory to synergies in practice, making
the most of research and innovation investments,
whatever their funding source, by mobilisingdifferent actors and encouraging them to interact,
raising awareness and creating new opportunities,
favouring efficient spending and therefore
maximizing the impact of investment.

Regions and Member States (and any otherinterested funding organisation) can decideto support these proposals to fully exploit theoutcomes of Horizon 2020’s world class evaluation
system to the ultimate benefit of both the project
proposer and of the local innovation eco-system.
With the Seal, funding authorities can easily identify
for support proposals from promising innovative
companies that want to grow and competeinternationally. Regions and Member States cantherefore more easily identify good quality proposals

17

26

https://ec.europa.eu/research/regions/index.cfm?pg=soe

Figure OI.6: Identifying proposals for the Seal of ExcellenceFunding threshold due toH2020 budget availability

FUNDED

Quality threshold

MERITING
funding...

SEAL OFEXCELLENCEREJECTED: 
not ready for fundingthat could be funded by European Structural andInvestment Funds (ESIF) - in line with ESIF priorities
and in compliance with national and relevant EU
rules - or their own national or regional resources.
The Seal of Excellence certificate was first awarded
to proposals to Horizon 2020’s SME Instrument,
which has a similar intervention logic to regional andnational funders, with its focus on SMEs, the small
size projects that are close to the market and its
single beneficiary-approach.
All qualifying proposals made to the SME
instrument since its launch (around 2 000 proposals
by January 2016) have been awarded a Seal of
Excellence certificate, and in the future, qualifying
proposals will receive it systematically as soon as
the evaluation results are communicated to them.
Meanwhile, in order to support the funding authorities
and organisations that are interested in setting
up support schemes compatible with the Seal of
Excellence, the Commission established a Communityof Practice to exchange good practice through regularmeetings and an extranet site. Membership had alreadygrown by January 2016 to 104 members, including
ESIF managing authorities at national or regional
level, funding agencies and private foundations from23 Member States and one country associated to
Horizon 2020. A number of countries and regions arethemselves developing concrete support schemes.

Based on the outcome of this first implementationof the Seal of Excellence and on the requests
received by the Commission, the Seal of Excellence
may be extended in the future to cover moreareas of Horizon 2020, starting with other monobeneficiary schemes.
European Innovation Council
Time and time again it is said that Europe is a sourceof excellent science, but is losing the race with otherindustrialised economies on innovation. It is even moreclear that Europe is behind the US and China whenit comes to rolling out disruptive innovations, andturning its engineering and technological successes
into world-beating brands. Scaling up businesses that
pioneer new, market-oriented innovations is anotherarea where Europe is behind its major competitors.
A number of positive steps have been taken in recent
years to integrate an innovation component into EU
programmes and policies, in particular Horizon 2020,
which has encouraged higher levels of businessparticipation than in the past. Nonetheless, theexisting rather complex array of support mechanisms
can be challenging for innovators (especially SMEs)
to navigate.
Despite the considerable efforts which havealready been undertaken to simplify administrative
processes, there is a concern that EU support for27

“Europe has excellent science, but we lack disruptive market-creating innovation. This
is what is needed to turn our best ideas into new jobs, businesses and opportunities”
Commissioner Carlos Moedas,
EU policy for the digital transformation of European business, Brussels, 16 February 2016

innovation still lacks the responsiveness that
innovators require in a time of ever-shortening
innovation lifecycles. While Europe has excellent
science, we lack sufficient disruptive marketcreating innovation that is required to turn ourbest ideas into new opportunities, businesses andjobs. In order to address this shortcoming, theCommission is exploring the scope for establishinga European Innovation Council (EIC).

A well-designed, fit for purpose EIC would add
value by meeting the needs of entrepreneurs andcompanies by converting knowledge and science
into market-creating products and services, as well
as by fostering a culture of entrepreneurship.

“Apart from putting the user at the centre, and enabling new players to enter
traditional markets, the digital economy has the capacity to create entirely newmarkets. This is what Clayton Christensen calls “market creating innovations”. Thinkof Uber or AirBnB. These are platforms that link free capacity or spare capacity that
already exists in society – extra houses or extra cars – with users that need them.
They are able to do this by being at the cutting-edge of the internet, apps, geolocationand mobile technology. They are successful, because they eliminate “pain points” in
the interaction – for example, you do not have to have cash with you to use an Uber,and they are also successful because they just work – the design, the service, theprocess, is easy for the user.
No doubt these new services pose concrete challenges to our regulatory and tax
systems. They raise questions of fairness and competition and these cannot be ignored,
but my point is that these businesses enable economic transactions that would
otherwise simply not happen. This is what I mean when I say that the digital creates
new markets and enables a type of innovation that creates new economic opportunities.
Again, this is a force for the democratisation of innovation: empowering thesharing economy, promoting employment and even a more sustainable use ofexisting resources, which can be positive for the environment.“
Commissioner Carlos Moedas, The democratisation of innovation,
Rome, 28 October 201528

Merging the digital into societal challenges
Europe must act now to harness the potential of
digitisation for its citizens, to tackle societal challenges
effectively, and to boost its businesses and industries.
The opportunities and challenges in this area are
growing. EU science, research and innovation policy
plays an important part in merging the physical anddigital worlds by exploiting the potential of digitaltechnologies, such as big data analytics and the Internetof Things to deliver innovative solutions to societal

challenges in areas like health, energy, food and water.
These four areas are the priorities for action.
Actions should also help create new businessmodels and adjust existing ones, as ‘physicaldigital’ innovations often entail new value-streams
that blur the lines between products and services,
consumption and production, online and offline. The
overall aim is to increase the impact of Europe’s
investments on its innovation capacity, so as tobetter tackle societal challenges, increase ourcompetitive advantage and create jobs.

E4Water – An example of Open Innovation in industry
Industry is one of the main water users in Europe, and one of the major polluters. The E4Water
project is working towards a shift in industrial water treatment and management in the process andchemical industries. International partners, namely industry stakeholders, research organisations andend users, are developing innovative solutions for efficient, ecological and economical industrial water
management. Open Innovation has driven the project from the very start: It combined the needs fromindustries to maximise resources and to minimise the environmental hazards for the population withsolutions that brought both economic benefits and a greener industrial eco-system.
More than 200 stakeholders provided during a series of workshops the necessary inflows of knowledge
that generated the outflows driving the innovations developed during the project. In addition, E4WATER
carried out a broad consultation among stakeholders, including the private sector, public authorities,
technology centres, European Technology Platforms, universities and end-users. Over 2 000 actors
contributed with a wide variety of ideas and solutions to the existing challenges.
Based on that input, the E4WATER partners developed technological innovations for different
industrial locations, in close consultation with the affected stakeholders. These solutions have had adirect impact in the environmental and water footprint by dramatically reducing the contaminantsin the waste streams from those industrial parks. E4WATER’s success mainly lies in the transfer ofknowledge between industrial stakeholders and the cooperation with public authorities and end-users.

29

“I will work closely with Commissioner Hogan to create a Food Research Area
with both EU and international partners by 2020.
The research area will focus on nutrition, climate, sustainability and economic
growth. I want research and innovation to contribute to resilient food systems thatprovide responsible, affordable and healthy food for us all. The research area will
operate on the basis of a multi-year research and innovation action plan that setsout our policy priorities; brings together new and existing initiatives and engages
as wide a range of people and organisations as possible.
I want it to operate on the principles of Open Innovation and Open Science. I want
it to be Open to the World. Ladies and gentlemen, food, water, health and energy,
are the four areas I consider most important to our immediate future.“Commissioner Carlos Moedas,
Working together for global food and nutrition security, Expo Milano, 15 October 2015

A second wave of Horizon 2020 simplification
If EU funding for research and innovation is to attract
the best scientists and most innovative companies,
the right balance must be struck between minimal
bureaucracy for participants and effective oversightof the investment of taxpayers’ euros.
Horizon 2020 was designed to simplify accessto funding and reduce the administrative burden
for participants in a project. This entailed major
simplification compared to its predecessors,
including a very simple cost reimbursement model,
streamlined checks and audits and the fully electronic
management of grants via a participant portal.
Further simplification is an ongoing objective. The
Commission introduced some changes based on
Horizon 2020’s first year of operation, including
simplified reporting requirements, and in autumn
2015 launched a major feedback exercise tocollect ideas for a second wave of simplification of
Horizon 2020. The online consultation generated
over 4 700 replies. The main issues already identified
include measures to reduce oversubscription, on
the treatment of costs related to internal invoicing,and on the requirements for time-recording.
Future simplification efforts may therefore include30

an improved and more widely used two-stage
proposal evaluation, a revision of the template andguidance for time-recording and a deeper analysisof the problems on internal invoicing, but also acontinuation of the permanent process of improving
the Participant Portal and the Commission’s guidance,
documentation and help services.

4. CONCLUSIONS
It is important to look beyond the current thinking toensure that an innovation-friendly policy environment
and an ecosystem which recognises the value of abroad approach to innovation are supported. This should
include users in the innovation process and fostering
the circulation of ideas and knowledge for innovation.
In the future, in addition to supply side measures,
there should be more focus on addressing proactively the needs of European businesses so as toenable them to grow, engaging with knowledge users
and citizens, and capitalising more efficiently on theknowledge base available in Europe. This would mean,
for instance, engaging more with citizens, users,
investors, businesses and business associations ina structured dialogue, and not only with universities
and research-performing organisations.

Open
ScienceOPEN SCIENCEOpen Science represents a new approach to thescientific process based on cooperative work andnew ways of diffusing knowledge by using digitaltechnologies and new collaborative tools. The idea
captures a systemic change to the way scienceand research have been carried out for the last
fifty years: shifting from the standard practices ofpublishing research results in scientific publications
towards sharing and using all available knowledge
at an earlier stage in the research process.

Open Science is to science what Web 2.0 was tosocial and economic transactions: allowing end users
to be producers of ideas, relations and services andin doing so enabling new working models, new social
relationships and leading to a new modus operandi
for science. Open Science is as important anddisruptive a shift as e-commerce has been for retail.
Just like e-commerce, it affects the whole ‘businesscycle’ of doing science and research – from theselection of research subjects, to the carrying out of
research and to its use and re-use - as well as all theactors and actions involved up front (e.g. universities)
or down the line (e.g. publishers).

33

A Vision of the Future
The year is 2030. Open Science has become a reality and is offering a whole range of new,unlimited opportunities for research and discovery worldwide. Scientists, citizens, publishers,
research institutions, public and private research funders, students and education professionals aswell as companies from around the globe are sharing an open, virtual environment, called The Lab.
Open source communities and scientists, publishing companies and the high-tech industry have pushed
the EU and UNESCO to develop common open research standards, establishing a virtual learning
gateway, offering free public access to all scientific data as well as to all publicly funded research.
The OECD as well as many countries from Africa, Asia, and Latin America have adopted these newstandards, allowing users to share a common platform to exchange knowledge at a global scale.
High-tech start-ups and small public-private partnerships have spread across the globe to become theservice providers of the new digital science learning network, empowering researchers, citizens, educators,
innovators and students worldwide to share knowledge by using the best available technology.
Free and open, high quality and crowd-sourced science, focusing on the grand societal challengesof our time, shapes the daily life of a new generation of researchers.

Just as the internet and globalisation have profoundlychanged the way we do business, interact socially,
consume culture or buy goods, they are now profoundly
impacting how we do research and science. We still
listen to music today, but the way they are made (nolonger only via traditional instruments) or sold (iTunes,
Spotify) is radically different than 20 years ago, when
the internet was hitting the music industry.
And just as people offer spare rooms via AirBnB,
why shouldn’t they be allowed to offer spare brain
power via citizen science?
The discussion on broadening the science base andon novel ways to produce and spread knowledge
gradually evolved from two global trends:
Open Access and Open Source. The former refers
to online, peer-reviewed scholarly outputs, which
are free to read, with limited or no copyright andlicensing restrictions, while Open Source refers
to software co-created without any proprietary
restriction and which can be accessed and used.
The Budapest Open Access Initiative of 200218
established Open Access for the first time as an18

http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/

34

internationally desirable publishing practice. Although
Open Access became primarily associated witha particular publishing or scientific dissemination
practice, the Budapest Open Access Initiative alreadysought to induce a broader Open Science practice that
includes the general re-use of all kinds of research
products, not just publications or data. But it is only
more recently that Open Science has coalesced into theconcept of a transformed scientific practice, shifting the
focus of researchers’ activity from ‘publishing as fast
as possible’ to ‘sharing knowledge as early as possible’.
Michael Nielsen’s book ‘Reinventing Discovery: The
New Era of Networked Science’ is arguably the firstand most comprehensive coverage of Open Science
accessible to a broad readership19 Michael Nielsen
advocated Open Science as “the idea that scientificknowledge of all kinds should be openly shared as
early as is practical in the discovery process”20. As
a result, the way science is done in 2030 will looksignificantly different from the way it is done now.
19

Nielsen, Michael (2012): Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked
Science. Princeton University Press.

20

The definition of Open Science was initially proposed by Michael Nielsen as an
informal working definition on an Open Science mailing list ’https://lists.okfn.
org/pipermail/open-science/2011-July/000907.html, prior to the publicationof his book. It very quickly received a large echo in the science community.

1. A DYNAMIC CONCEPT IN EVOLUTION
The European Commission’s 2014 public consultationon ‘Science 2.0: Science in Transition’21 sought
the views of major stakeholders to gain a better
understanding of the full potential of ‘Science 2.0’

and to assess any need for action. Stakeholders
preferred the term ‘Open Science’ to describe thetransformation of scientific practice.

“The days of keeping our research results to ourselves are over. There is far
more to gain from sharing data and letting others access and analyse that data.
For example, if sharing big data reveals that a certain kind of cancer activates aparticular molecular pathway in most cases and it turns out that there is alreadya drug approved and available to block the activation of that molecular pathway,
clinical trials can begin almost immediately. Saving time, money and lives.
Or if scientists want to monitor the effects of climate change on local
ecosystems, they can use Open Science to engage citizen reporting, andrapidly multiply the data at their disposal.
To make the most of Open Science opportunities for Europe, I plan to focus onopen data, open access and research integrity over the course of my mandate.“
Commissioner Carlos Moedas,“European research and innovation for global challenges”, Lund, 4 December 2015

The background paper that served as the basis forthe public consultation22 described Open Science as‘the on-going evolution in the modus operandi of
doing research and organising science’. This evolution
is enabled by Big Data and digital technologies andis driven by both the globalisation of the scientificcommunity and increasing public demand to address
the societal challenges of our times. Open Science
entails the ongoing transitions in the way researchis performed, researchers collaborate, knowledge isshared, and science is organised.

21

http://ec.europa.eu/research/consultations/science-2.0/22

http://ec.europa.eu/research/consultations/science-2.0/background.pdf

Open Science has an impact on the entire
research cycle, from the inception of research toits publication, and on how this cycle is organised.
The outer circle in Figure OS.1 shows the newinterconnected nature of Open Science, while theinner circle shows the entire scientific process, fromthe conceptualisation of research ideas to publishing.
Each step in the scientific process is linked to ongoing changes brought about by Open Science,such as the emergence of alternative systems toestablish scientific reputation, changes in the way
the quality and impact of research are evaluated,
the growing use of scientific blogs, open annotationand open access to data and publications.

35

Figure OS.1: Open Science – opening up the research process
Citiz
scien en
ce
en
co

n
Opeation
ot
ann

nc

ep

Sc
ie
blo nce
g

tu

al

isa

ew

vi

tio

n

Re

Collaborative
bibliographies

Pre-print

a-ga
Dat

Co

Op
acc en
ess

ther
ing

de

Analysis
tion
lica
Pub

Open da
ta

Op

bo O
ok pe
s/w n t
or ab
kfl
ow

Data ive
s
inten

ve
ati n
ern tatio stl
A pu emre ysts

Source: http://ec.europa.eu/research/consultations/science-2.0/background.pdf

All institutions involved in science are affected,
including research organisations, research councils
and funding bodies.

According to the measurement school, the reputationand evaluation of individual researchers is still
mainly based on citation-based metrics. The Impact
Factor (IF) – the most widely used being Thomson
The trends are irreversible and they have already
Reuter’s product - is a measure reflecting thegrown well beyond individual projects. They
average number of citations to articles published in
predominantly result from a bottom-up process
an academic journal. It is used as a proxy for thedriven by a growing number of researchers
relative importance of a journal. Numerous criticisms
who increasingly employ social media forhave been made of citation-based metrics, especially
Source : http://ec.europa.eu/research/consultations/science-2.0/background.pdf
their research, to initiate globally coordinatedwhen (mis)used to assess the performance of
research projects and share results at an early
individual researchers: often they are not applicablestage in the research process.
at the individual level; they do not take into accountthe broader social and economic function of scientificFecher and Friesike (2013)23 structure the overall
research; they are not adapted to the increased scaleof research; and they cannot recognise new types ofchanges encompassed by the term Open Science
work that researchers need to perform.
in five schools of thought: The infrastructure
school which is concerned with the technologicalarchitecture, the public school which is concerned
Web-based metrics for measuring research output,
with the accessibility of knowledge creation, thepopularised as “altmetrics” since 2010, havemeasurement school which is concerned withrecently received a lot of attention: some measurealternative impact assessment, the democratic
the impact at article level, others make it possible
school which is concerned with access to knowledge
to assess the many outcomes of research besides
and the pragmatic school which is concerned with
scientific articles (data, presentations, blog posts,
collaborative research.
mentions in social media etc.).

23

Fecher, B. & Friesike, S. (2013). Open Science: One Term, Five Schoolsof Thought. In Bartling, S. & Friesike (Eds.), Opening Science (pp. 17-47).
New York, NY: Springer.

36

It is clear that the current reputation and evaluation
system has to adapt to the new dynamics of

Open Science and acknowledge and incentivise
engagement in Open Science. Researchers engaging
in Open Science have growing expectations that
their work, including intermediate products suchas research data, will be better rewarded or taken
into account in their career development (seeexamples in ‘Recent milestones in the debate on
Open Science’). Vice-versa, the (re)use of open data
will require appropriate codes of conduct requiring,for example, the proper acknowledgement of theoriginal creator of the data.

Recent milestones in the debate on Open Science•

The San Francisco Declaration On Research Assessment wants to put an end to the use of
bibliometric parameters when deciding which researchers should receive grants or jobs. (December
2012)

•

The Economist makes the problems in science a cover story (“How Science Goes Wrong“). It focuseson unreliable research and states that many errors in science go uncorrected. (October 2013)•Nobel Prize winner Randy Schekman calls for a boycott of journals with high impact factors like
Science, Nature and Cell. (December 2013)•

The Reproducibility Initiative wants to reproduce landmark studies since reproducing important
papers in the current system is not rewarded, while it is of vital importance. (August 2012)•

Medical journal The Lancet wants to “increase value and reduce waste” in biomedical research.
It discusses ways to do so in a series of articles. (January 2014)•

The US National Institutes of Health are exploring initiatives to restore the self-correcting natureof preclinical research. (January 2014)•

Promotion and grant committees should be reading through papers and judging research by its
merit, says Nobel Prize winner Sydney Brenner. “I know of many places in which they say theyneed this paper in Nature, or I need my paper in Science because I’ve got to get a post doc. But
there is no judgment of its contribution as it is.” (March 2014)•

Biomedical science in the US needs to be rescued from its “systemic flaws”, write Bruce Alberts
and Harold Varmus in PNAS (March 2014). One of their recommendations is “to gradually reduce
the number of entrants into PhD training in biomedical science – producing a better alignment
between the number of entrants and their future opportunities – and to alter the ratio of trainees
to staff scientists in research groups.”•

Academic environments often place more value on the discovery itself and less value on
learning how to realize the potential benefit of its application. This should change, universities
should foster implementation science, write three doctors in the New England Journal of
Medicine. (May 2014)•

In July 2014 the European Commission starts an online “Public consultation ‘Science 2.0’: Science inTransition” about the changing science system. The Science in Transition initiative features prominently
in the background analysis. “In the Netherlands, an intensive debate has evolved on the basis ofa position-paper entitled ‘Science in Transition’. The ongoing debate in the Netherlands addressed,
among others, the issue of the use of bibliometrics in relation to the determination of scientific careers.”

37•Former Secretary General of the European Molecular Biology Organization Gottfried Schatz
analyses the effects of Big Science in an essay in Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology. The
exponential growth of science has led to meaningless quantification, a crisis in peer review,
reproducibility problems and the rise of fellowships. (May 2014)•

Modify reward system for science to create reproducible and translatable research, says John
Ioannidis in PLoS Medicine. With the current reward system “an estimated 85% of researchresources are wasted”. (October 2014)•

Science should strive for “impact, not impact factor”, says PNAS Editor-in-Chief Inder Verma.
“When it comes to judging the quality and significance of a body of work, there is no substitutefor qualitative assessment. And it bears repeating that the impact factor is not an article-level
metric, nor was it intended as a yardstick for comparing researchers’ scholarly contributions.
However, at many institutions performance assessments hinge greatly on this number, whichcurrently wields outsize influence on the advancement of scientific careers.” (June 2015)•

In an extensive review about quantitative indicators, ‘The Metric Tide’, a committee chaired byJames Wilsdon in the UK concludes: “There is legitimate concern that some indicators can bemisused or ‘gamed’: journal impact factors, university rankings and citation counts being threeprominent examples.” (July 2015)•

In PNAS two researchers “[S]how that biomedical research outcomes over the last five decades,
as estimated by both life expectancy and New Molecular Entities approved by the Food andDrug Administration, have remained relatively constant despite rising resource inputs andscientific knowledge.” (July 2015)

Source: adapted from www.scienceintransition.nl
References to the articles in question are listed in the Credits section at the end of the book

The vision in action
An early and well-known example of Open Scienceis the Human Genome Project that started in 1990.
The data on the human genome was widely shared
among the scientific community in the course of
the project, while at the same time they kept a
moratorium on publishing in order to encourage
optimal collaboration. Because of this openness,this enabled them to decode the human genome
in less than 15 years.24 Open Science in action has
shifted the prime focus of researchers away frompublishing towards knowledge sharing. The project
has also had a considerable economic impact.25
24

See e.g.: http://www.ngfn.de/de/verstehen_der_menschlichen_erbsubstanz.html

25Studies on the ecomonic value of the Human Genome Project summarise thatfor each 1 US Dollar invested in the project 141 US Dollar were generated:
Batelle Memorial Institute, 2011 [online]: http://battelle.org/media/pressreleases/$3.8b-investment-in-human-genome-project-drove-$796b-ineconomic-impact-creating-310-000-jobs-and-launching-the-genomic-revolution

38

The ongoing changes are progressively transforming
scientific practices and innovative tools to facilitatecommunication, collaboration, and data analysis
are appearing (see section A new ecosystem forOpen Science). Researchers increasingly work
together to create knowledge. Online tools createa shared space where creative conversation canbe scaled up. As a result, the problem-solving
process can be faster and the range of problems
that can be solved can be expanded (Nielsen 2012).
The ecosystem underpinning Open Science isevolving very rapidly. Social network platforms forresearchers already attract millions of users andBatelle Memorial Institute, 2013 [online]: http://www.battelle.org/media/
press-releases/updated-battelle-study-genetics-and-genomics-industry

are being used to begin and validate more research
projects in a “brain sourced” way (Crouzier 201526).
A prominent example of “brain-sourced” researchis the Polymath Project.27 In 2009, Tim Gowers, amathematician at Cambridge University, took an
unsolved mathematical problem and published it inhis scientific blog in order to tackle it in a completely
open way with anyone allowed to contribute. Only
37 days after the start of the project, Gowers
announced that the on-line contributors had solved
not just his original problem, but a harder problem
that included the original as a specific example.

A new ecosystem for Open Science
Academia.edu is a US-based platform for academics to share research papers, monitor deep analytics
around the impact of their research, and track the research of academics they follow. By January 2016,
over 30 million academics had signed up to the site, which has over 36 million unique visitors a month. A
recent study found that papers uploaded to Academia.edu receive a 73% boost in citations over five years.
Research Gate, based in Berlin, has virtually identical functions to Academia.edu, however it
generates a Research Impact Factor for the uploaded documents of researchers, based on factors
such as ‘classical’ citations and on the number of downloads by other users. It had 8 million users
in January 2016 with 80 million publications available.
Mendeley is an Amsterdam-based reference manager. Apart from the ‘Facebook for Scientists”
features, Mendeley also allows for open annotation and generation of bibliographies. With around3 million users (June 2014), Mendeley was purchased by the Elsevier publishing company in 2013.
Figshare is an online digital repository where researchers can make their research outputs available
in a citable, shareable and discoverable manner, including figures, datasets, images and videos. It
is now financially supported by Digital Science, a division of Macmillan Publishers.
F1000Research is an Open Science publishing platform for life scientists, offering immediate
publication without editorial bias. The traditional anonymous pre-publication peer review of
research articles can cause long delays before new results become visible. F1000Research uses
an author-led process, publishing all scientific research within a few days. Open, invited peer review
of articles is conducted after publication, focusing on scientific soundness rather than novelty or
impact. All published research articles are accompanied by the data on which the reported results
are based, which is crucial to enable reanalysis, replication attempts and data reuse.

Though impressive, the numbers mentioned in thesection A new ecosystem for Open Science do notreflect the degree of awareness and the adoption ratesof the most innovative tools such as social networks,
26

27

Crouzier, Thomas (2015): Science Ecosystem 2.0: how will change occur?
http://ec.europa.eu/research/innovation-union/pdf/expert-groups/rise/science_ecosystem_2.0-how_will_change_occur_crouzier_072015.
pdf#view=fit&pagemode=none
http://polymathprojects.org/

collaborative writing tools or blogs for researchers.
Recent reports still show a considerable lack ofawareness of Open Science among researchers.28

28

Pscheida, D. et al, (2014): Nutzung von Social Media und onlinebasierten
Anwendungen in der Wissenschaft. Leibniz Forschungsverbund Science 2.0
Vignoli, Michela et al (2014): YEAR Consultation on Science 2.0. [online]:
https://scienceintransition.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/year_consultation_science-2dot0_v1-0.pdf

39However, fuelled by the new opportunities forknowledge and data-sharing, more Open Science
practices have emerged to address pressing issues
at an early stage. For example, five months into thelargest Ebola outbreak in history, an internationalgroup of researchers sequenced three viralgenomes, sampled from patients in Guinea. The
data was made public that same month.29 The
National Institutes of Health in the United States
now require grantees to make large scale genomic
data public by the time of publication at the latest.30
In the EU, steady progress towards Open Science has
also been made, in some cases thanks to EU-funded
activities (see the section Data sharing in publichealth emergencies). The ‘European Lead Factory’project under the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI)
is a very good example of Open Science because inthis project, academic and industry partners are
pooling together around half a million compounds(chemical molecules). This is unique and has neverbeen achieved before in Europe, either between
academic and industry or between companies
themselves. Secondly the 500,000 compounds
are publicly and freely available in a repository to

any scientist who wants to screen and validate apotential new drug target. The costs of screening arecovered by the project.
Two European research projects in environmental
science aim to put the latest results from ecosystem
research into practice. They have created an
open platform accessible to the wider public toprovide tested, practical and tailored solutions forenvironmental management and decision-making
and to help stakeholders to apply the ecosystemservices and research results into concrete actions(see the section Open Science in Action: open
platforms for the support of scientists and decision
makers). The Climate Joint Programme Initiative31
supported by the 7th Framework Programme fosters
the free flow of knowledge and information to help
mutual learning (see see the section JPI Climate:Open Science tackling a societal challenge).
These examples also demonstrate policymakers’
engagement in encouraging data-sharing among therelevant actors in various fields, such as public healthor climate change for example.

Data sharing in public health emergencies
When scientists and policy makers talk about data sharing this often refers to the data underlying
scientific publications. But in public health emergencies such as the recent Ebola epidemic, publichealth officials and patients cannot afford the time lag of scientific publications. Data, such as thaton the evolution of the Ebola virus or on clinical trials of anti-Ebola treatments, needs to be shared
at a very early stage with public health decision makers, clinicians and other researchers, who canbuild on it to deliver solutions for patients.
The European Commission has strongly supported the World Health Organisation in its efforts
to agree on standards for such data sharing in public health emergencies. The Commission-led‘Global Research Collaboration for Infectious Disease Preparedness’ (GIoPID-R) is looking at ways
to encourage and oblige researchers funded by Horizon 2020 (and other funding programmes) tocomply with such global norms in data sharing in public health emergencies.

29

N.L Yozwiak et al (2015) http://www.nature.com/news/data-sharing-makeoutbreak-research-open-access-1.16966

30

https://gds.nih.gov/

40

31

http://www.jpi-climate.eu/home

Open Science in Action:
Open platforms for the support of scientists and decision makers
Two projects funded by the 7th Framework Programme for Research: OpenNESS (Operationalization ofnatural capital and ecosystem services)32 and OPERAs (Operational Potential of Ecosystem Research
Applications)33 are creating an ‘Open Platform’ (OPPLA), a truly ‘open’ fee-free platform for individual
users not seeking to commercialise data/products already in the public domain.
It will provide a number of facilities to support scientists, policymakers, consultants, businesses,
environmental NGOs, land managers, spatial planners and economists, in making nature work forpeople by mainstreaming innovative research results into daily practice and promoting collaborations
and co-creation processes. The outcome of the projects will contribute to the ‘operationalization ofnatural capital and ecosystem services’ and, in consequence, to the further promotion of nature-based
solutions to address societal challenges, an initiative currently pursued through Horizon 2020. OPPLA
will provide practical advice, guidance, tools and techniques, a database of information and casestudies to the broad range of stakeholders and users mentioned above. It will in addition provide anopen ‘Question & Answer’ facility related to natural capital and ecosystem services, a “marketplace”
enabling members to find, among others, consultants specialising in natural capital and ecosystemservices, to help with their own projects and a helpdesk. The “community of practice” that is expected
to be established through this platform will have the possibility to share resources, new ideas andpractical experience and get informed about relevant events, training courses and have access toother services on demand. Oppla is built for and by its users since the latter will have the opportunity
to actively contribute to its further development towards, among others, provision of services such as
self-certification of products and services and crowd-sourced enquiry (Ask Oppla).

JPI Climate:Open Science tackling a societal challenge
The Climate Joint Programming Initiative (JPI) is a collaboration between 16 European countries
to coordinate jointly their climate research and fund new transnational research initiatives. JPIClimate connects scientific disciplines, enables cross-border research and increases science-practiceinteraction. It integrates European climate change science and connects it to efforts in Europe to beboth climate friendly (through mitigation) and climate proof (through adaptation) by coordinating
and developing excellent science, industrial leadership and transnational collaboration. Five framing
principles guide the ongoing work and further development of JPI Climate: stakeholder orientation,transparency, cost effectiveness, sustainability, adaptability.
According to the transparency principle all collaborative efforts are based on the notions of
openness, mutual learning, mutual dependency and joint creativity; and foster the free flow
and sharing of information, experiences and opinions. Access to knowledge and information is aprerequisite for individual and mutual learning processes. Given the huge and complex societal
challenge that is addressed by JPI Climate, fostering both is a prerequisite to its success.
32

http://www.openness-project.eu/

33

http://operas-project.eu/

41

2. THE LINK TO OPEN INNOVATION AND OPEN TO THE WORLD
Open Science permits knowledge to circulate
more quickly and be more freely available. The
Commission’s policy actions on Open Science willreinforce the EU’s political priority of fosteringknowledge circulation, since Open Science is inpractice about ‘sharing knowledge as early aspractically possible in the discovery process’34.
Furthermore, the trends towards Open Access are
redefining the framework conditions for scienceand thus have an impact on how (Open) innovation
is produced by encouraging a more dynamic
circulation of knowledge. It can enable morescience-based start-ups to emerge thanks to the
exploitation of openly accessible research results.35
Open Science, however, does not mean ‘freescience’. It is essential to ensure that intellectual
property is protected before making knowledge
publicly available in order to subsequently attract
investments that can help translate research

results into innovation. If this is taken into account,fuller and wider access to scientific publications
and research data can help to accelerateinnovation. The potential benefits of opening up
research information are clearly recognised in theEuropean Commission’s investment plan for Europe
where it is stated that in order to ‘boost researchand innovation, EU competitiveness would benefit
from fewer barriers to knowledge transfer, open
access to scientific research and greater mobilityof researchers.’36
In this context, Open Access can help overcome
the barriers that innovative companies, inparticular SMEs, face in accessing the results ofresearch funded by the public purse. It has been
estimated that switching to open access could
result in annual savings of around £400 million
for the UK, €133m for the Netherlands and €80m
for Denmark.37

A healthy knowledge economy relies on the quantity, quality and accessibilityof data. In the 21st century, we can be sure that means quantity of data on
an international scale, across international research institutions. We can be
sure that the quality of data will be vetted by scientists from across the globe
thanks to global communications and we can be sure that the accessibility todata will become: increasingly universal, increasingly open, and require new
business models.
Therefore, any European knowledge economy of the future must be swift toadapt and Open to the World.
Commissioner Carlos Moedas,
Promoting excellence through enhanced EU-China researcher mobility and cooperation,
Beijing, 7 September 201534

Nielsen 2012

35

H. Chesbrough, From Open Science to Open Innovation, Science|Business
Publishing 2015, http://www.sciencebusiness.net/eventsarchive/OpenScience/

42

36

Communication ‘An Investment Plan for Europe’ COM(2014)903 final, p.16.
http://ec.europa.eu/transparency/regdoc/rep/1/2014/EN/1-2014-903EN-F1-1.Pdf

37

Houghton et. al (2009) Economic implications of Alternative Scholarly
Publishing Models: Exploring the Costs and Benefits. Swan, A. (2010) Modelling
scholarly communication options: costs and benefits for universities.

Data is becoming increasingly important in allareas of the European economy. The European
Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) located on the
Wellcome Genome Campus in Hinxton, UK andamong others funded by the European Commission,
provides a good example of the economic impact of
opening up research data. EMBL-EBI manages public
life-science data on a very large scale, making a richresource of information freely available to the global
life science community. A recent study has valued
the benefits of EMBL-EBI to users and their funders
at £1 billion (approximately EUR 1.26 billion) per
year worldwide – equivalent to more than 20 times
the direct operational cost of the institute. The
report estimates that EMBL-EBI data and services
contributed to the wider realisation of future
research impacts worth £920 million (approximately
EUR 1.16 billion) every year.38

Open Science is a global phenomenon and many
countries outside Europe such as Japan, research
funders including the United States National
Institutes of Health and foundations such as the Billand Melinda Gates Foundation are also developing
Open Science initiatives. Japan39 has been clearly
influenced by the European Commission’s initiatives
on Open Science and the United States has beendeveloping Open Data policies at institutional levels
since 2003 (see the section National Institutesof Health (NIH-USA) Data Sharing policy andguidance). Differences in approach are generally
seen in modalities such as the length of embargo
periods prior to open access publication. The open
access policy of foundations such as the Bill andMelinda Gates Foundation are similar to those of theEuropean Commission (see the section Open Accessand the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation).

National Institutes of Health (NIH-USA) Data Sharing policy and guidance23
Data sharing promotes many goals of the NIH research endeavour. It is particularly importantfor unique data that cannot be readily replicated. Data sharing allows scientists to expedite thetranslation of research results into knowledge, products, and procedures to improve human health.
There are many reasons to share data from NIH-supported studies. Sharing data reinforces open
scientific inquiry, encourages diversity of analysis and opinion, promotes new research, makes
possible the testing of new or alternative hypotheses and methods of analysis, supports studies ondata collection methods and measurement, facilitates the education of new researchers, enables
the exploration of topics not envisioned by the initial investigators, and permits the creation of newdatasets when data from multiple sources are combined.
In the NIH’s view, all data should be considered for data sharing. Data should be made as widelyand freely available as possible while safeguarding the privacy of participants, and protecting
confidential and proprietary data. To facilitate data sharing, investigators submitting a research
application requesting $500,000 or more of direct costs in any single year to NIH on or after
October 1, 2003 are expected to include a plan for sharing final research data for research
purposes, or state why data sharing is not possible.

38

http://www.beagrie.com/static/resource/EBI-impact-summary.pdf

39

http://www8.cao.go.jp/cstp/sonota/openscience/150330_openscience_summary_en.pdf

40

http:/grants.nih.gov/grants/policy/data_sharing/data_sharing_guidance.htm

43Open Access and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
The Open Access policy24 of the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation contains the following elements:
1. Publications Are Discoverable and Accessible Online. Publications will be deposited in a specified
repository(s) with proper tagging of metadata.
2. Publication Will Be On “Open Access” Terms. All publications shall be published under theCreative Commons Attribution 4.0 Generic License (CC BY 4.0) or an equivalent license. This
will permit all users of the publication to copy and redistribute the material in any medium
or format and transform and build upon the material, including for any purpose (includingcommercial) without further permission or fees being required.
3. Foundation Will Pay Necessary Fees. The foundation would pay reasonable fees required by apublisher to effect publication on these terms.
4. Publications Will Be Accessible and Open Immediately. All publications shall be available
immediately upon their publication, without any embargo period. An embargo period is the period
during which the publisher will require a subscription or the payment of a fee to gain access to the
publication. We are, however, providing a transition period of up to two years from the effective
date of the policy (or until January 1, 2017). During the transition period, the foundation will allow
publications in journals that provide up to a 12-month embargo period.
5. Data Underlying Published Research Results Will Be Accessible and Open Immediately. The
foundation will require that data underlying the published research results be immediately
accessible and open. This too is subject to the transition period and a 12-month embargo may
be applied.

Science International, which brings together
representatives of four major international scienceorganisations, is responding to a growing number ofcalls from various actors, both within and outside thescientific community, and from inter-governmental
bodies such as the G8, the OECD and the UN, foropen access to publicly-funded scientific data,
especially regarding data of particular importanceto major global challenges.

41

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/How-We-Work/General-Information/OpenAccess-Policy

44

Science International is therefore developing a plan
for a global discussion on Open Science in general andfor a data science capacity in Africa. The European
initiatives to establish an Open Science Policy
Platform and to create a European Open Science
Cloud (see below) have provided the inspiration forthis global activity.

3. OPEN SCIENCE IN THE COMMISSION’S NEW PRIORITIESIn accordance with the political priorities ofCommissioner Moedas42 and as a result of its 2014
public consultation, in 2015 the European Commission
identified five lines of potential policy actions to support
the development of Open Science in Europe. The
potential interventions build on the expectation that
Open Science will eventually lead to better science, by
making science more credible (addressing scientificintegrity), reliable (better and more transparent
verification of data), efficient (avoid duplication of
resources) and more responsive to societal challenges.
The five lines of potential policy actions are:1. Fostering and creating incentives for Open Science,by fostering Open Science in education programmes,
promoting best practices and increasing the inputof knowledge producers into a more Open Scienceenvironment (citizen science). This area is also
concerned with guaranteeing the quality, impact
and research integrity of (Open) Science;
2. Removing barriers to Open Science: this implies,
among other issues, a review of researchers’
careers so as to create incentives and rewards
for engaging in Open Science;
3. Mainstreaming and further promoting open
access policies as regards both research data
and research publications;
4. Developing research infrastructures forOpen Science, to improve data hosting, accessand governance, with the development of acommon framework for research data andcreation of a European Open Science Cloud,a major initiative to build the necessary
Open Science infrastructure in Europe; and,5. Embedding Open Science in society as a socioeconomic driver, whereby Open Science becomes
instrumental in making science more responsive
to societal and economic expectations, inparticular by addressing major challenges facedby society.

42

http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_SPEECH-15-5243_en.htm

The European Commission has stated its intention
to establish an Open Science Policy Platform
in 2016 and several expert groups to propose
recommendations for developing Open Science policy
through a structured discussion with all the relevant
actors involved in science and research in Europe.
This dialogue constitutes an opportunity todevelop, guide and monitor Open Science with the
involvement of the people who practice it.
The Open Science Policy Platform will becomposed of representatives of European umbrellaorganisations representing the major stakeholder
groups of universities, research funding bodies,
research-performing organisations, citizen science,associations of scientific publishers, academies ofscience, Open Science platforms and intermediaries,and (research) libraries.
The Open Science Policy Platform will advise theCommission on the development and implementationof cross-cutting issues concerning Open Science inline with the five broad lines of policy actions. Several
expert groups will address the following issues:
rewards for researchers, altmetrics, the European
Open Science Cloud, changing business models for
publishing, research integrity, Citizen Science, open
education and skills, and FAIR Open Data.
The expert groups are being launched in phases.
In 2015, the Commission’s Directorate-General for
Research and Innovation launched working groups on
Altmetrics and on the European Open Science Cloud.
The establishment of a European Open Science
Cloud under the Digital Single Market strategy of
the European Commission43 is a key part of Europe’s
ambition to support the transition to Open Scienceand to make the most of data-driven science. The
aim is to make relevant research data findable,
accessible, interoperable and re-useable (‘FAIR’) to all
European researchers. The Cloud will bring together
existing and emerging data infrastructures to createa virtual environment for all European researchers tostore, manage, analyse and re-use data.
43

http://ec.europa.eu/priorities/digital-single-market_en45

The European Open Science Cloud
The European Open Science Cloud aims to create
a trusted European environment for hosting andprocessing research data to help maintain theworld-leading role of European science.
It will be achieved by creating a world-classscientific infrastructure, which will help ensure that
European stakeholders reap the full benefits of datadriven science and services for the digital economy
and wider society.
The Cloud will offer 1.7 million European researchers
and 70 million professionals in science andtechnology a virtual environment with open andseamless services for the storage, management,
analysis and re-use of data that is linked to theirresearch activities, across borders and scientificdisciplines. It will be free at the point of use.
This initiative is part of Europe’s ambition to support
the transition to Open Science in the context of theDigital Single Market. It aims to meet an urgent
need of the scientific community to increase accessto and re-use of data, and to reduce the cost ofdata storage and high-performance analysis bypooling existing capacity and by aggregating
demand, initially by researchers in the public sector.

46

The initiative will increase awareness of the valueof data and the potential of Open Science, andhelp boost the range of incentives for academics,
industry and public services to share their data as
widely as possible. It will enable interoperability fordata sharing, long-term accessibility and re-use
through integrated and sustainable infrastructures
accessible across disciplines in both public andprivate areas. It will address the challengesof fragmentation by federating scientificinfrastructures in the virtual environment of thecloud, to increase efficiency, rationalise efforts andreduce costs through its pan-European governance.
Overall, the European Open Science Cloud will
increase capacity, consolidate scientific services
and strategically govern resources:•• Cloud-based services for Open Science enabling
researchers to openly share and analyse
research data across technologies, disciplines
and countries. The service dimension will foster,
implement and mainstream initiatives driven
by the scientific community to harmonise andbridge data standards, policies, technologies,
infrastructures and communities.

•• Governance platform for policy development

In some disciplines that rely heavily on big data
sets, such as physics and life sciences, scientists are
already making use of advanced data infrastructures
to store, share and analyse data. Conversely, moredispersed or ‘analogue’ scientific communities, suchas citizen scientists, researchers in the humanities or
those working in less-developed areas where limited
data is available (such as rare diseases or genomics ofrare species), are just starting to experiment with local
solutions to the same problem, based on smaller andsimpler datasets. This is commonly referred to as ‘thelong tail of science’. The data and service layer of theEuropean Open Science Cloud will provide common
solutions for data storage, sharing and analysis for
all types of scientific communities. Indeed, existing
tools and expertise from leading scientific disciplines
may benefit the long tail, while greater overall
demand may increase data quality and make the joint
procurement of services cheaper, as well as providing
other benefits. Since the Cloud can potentially provide
benefits for all types of scientific communities, its
governance structure should reflect their various andspecific needs (see Figure OS.2).

on infrastructure and services, mechanisms
for global data stewardship, decision making
on funding and long-term sustainability. The
governance will involve scientific users, research
funders and implementers, building on existing
governance structures, such as ESFRI, eIRG,
GEANT, PRACE, ELIXIR, Belmont Forum and othersimilar federating initiatives.
The initiative reinforces Open Science, Open
Innovation and Open to the World policies. It will
foster best practices of global data findability
and accessibility (FAIR data), help researchers get
their data skills recognised and rewarded (careers,
altmetrics); help address issues of access andcopyright (IPR) and data subject privacy; allow easier
replicability of results and limit data wastage e.g.
of clinical trial data (research integrity); contributeto clarification of the funding model for data
generation and preservation, reducing rent-seeking
and priming the market for innovative researchservices e.g. advanced TDM (new business models).

Bottom-up governanceFederation
Legacy and sustainability
Leverage of MS investment
Trust

Governance layer

IPR and privacy protection
Big data analytics
Data fusion across disciplines
High performance computing

Data and service layer

Data access and re-use
Data manipulation and export
Data discovery and catalogue
High-speed connectivity
Super-Computing

Infrastructure layer

Data storage

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Figure OS.2: Governance of the European Open Science Cloud

Source: DG Research and Innovation (2015)

47

The Open Science Policy Platform will advise theCommission, based on bottom up discussion andanalysis of best practices, on the policy actions
necessary to ensure that Open Science fulfils its
potential to radically increase the quality andimpact of European research. And to ensurethat any policy discussions are based on thelatest information, in 2016 the Commission will
also set up an Open Science Monitor which will
identify, quantify and assess the quality of all theongoing trends in Open Science, thus providing theEuropean Commission with up-to-date informationon the rapidly changing Open Science environment.
Advancing Open Access and Data Policies
The European Commission sees Open Accessnot as an end in itself but as a tool to facilitate
and improve the transparency and circulation ofscientific information in Europe and ultimately,
to produce even more high quality science andcontribute to better policy making.

We need to shift our focus from publishing as soon as possible, to sharing andcollaborating as soon as possible. Public investment in research and innovation
should have the greatest social and economic benefits possible: improving the
public relationship with our science systems and opening research results to new
innovation and business opportunities. Big and open data alone could be worth
an extra 1.9% to EU-28 GDP by 2020. To remain prosperous and competitive, tocontinue leading the forefront of learning, this is an opportunity we simply cannot
afford to miss… Expensive fees for publicly funded research results that could be of
benefit to citizens, must end, and new business models put in place.
Commissioner Carlos Moedas, Freedom is absolutely necessary for scientific progress, Brussels,
26 January 2015

Publicly funded knowledge must be available forresearchers and the private sector to enhance
the knowledge base, reduce regional disparities
in terms of research, promote new technologies
and products, and produce innovative solutions tosocietal challenges. Unrestricted and free of charge
access to publications is backed by a growing
number of universities, research centres andfunding agencies across Europe.
In 2012, therefore, the Commission published acomprehensive package of policy measures toimprove access to scientific information produced inEurope.44 Furthermore, Open Access to publications
is now mandatory for research results arising fromprojects funded by Horizon 2020, which has also
launched a pilot initiative on Open Research Data.45
Almost all Member States have set up legal andadministrative rules to support “Open Access” toscientific publications, and some are also promoting
Open Access to data.46 Generally there are twomodels of Open Access to publications: Green (selfarchiving) and Gold (open access publishing). Most
EU Member States prefer one or other model, but
not always exclusively so, often resulting in a mix ofboth models being applied. Few Member States havelaws requiring open access to publications, however a
single institution may make it mandatory, for example

4544Communication ‘A Reinforced European Research Area Partnership for
Excellence and Growth’ COM(2012)392; Communication, ‘Towards better
access to scientific information’ COM(2012)401; Commission Recommendationon access to and preservation of scientific information COM(2012)4890).

48

http://ec.europa.eu/research/openscience/index.cfm?pg=openaccess
http://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/docs/h2020-funding-guide/crosscutting-issues/open-access-dissemination_en.htm

46

Commission SWD “ERA Facts and Figures 2013”, p. 28

by making Open Access a condition of funding or apositive evaluation of a researcher’s career.47

licences while ensuring the quality, discoverability
and usability of research results.48

In 2014 the Finnish Ministry of Education andCulture published an ambitious Open Science andresearch roadmap. Based on the assumption that
Open Science and research can lead to surprising
discoveries and creative insights, Finland is
promoting initiatives to open up the information
produced by publicly funded research (publications,data and methods) by fostering open publication,
open peer review, parallel archiving under open

The Registry of Open Access Repository Mandates
and Policies (ROARMAP)49 charts the growth of open
access mandates and policies globally. There has beena steady increase between 2005 and 2015 in thenumber of registered policies adopted by universities,
research institutions and research funders that requireor request researchers to provide open access to theirpeer-reviewed research articles by depositing them inan open access repository (see Figure OS.3).

Figure OS.3: Growth of Open Access Repository Mandates and Policies

Policies Adopted by Quarter
800

Number of Policies

600

400

0

2005-1
2005-2
2005-3
2005-4
2006-1
2006-2
2006-3
2006-4
2007-1
2007-2
2007-3
2007-4
2008-1
2008-2
2008-3
2008-42009-1
2009-2
2009-32009-4
2010-1
2010-2
2010-3
2010-4
2011-1
2011-2
2011-3
2011-4
2012-1
2012-2
2012-32012-42013-1
2013-2
2013-32013-4
2014-1
2014-2
2014-32014-4
2015-1
2015-2
2015-32015-4
2016-1200

Year and Quarter
Research organisation

Sub-unit of research organisation

FunderFunder and research organisation

Multiple research organisations

Source: http://roarmap.eprints.org/
47

European Commission (forthcoming). Access to and Preservation of Scientific
Information in Europe. Report on the implementation of Commission
Recommendation C(2012) 4890 final

48

http://openscience.fi/

49

http://roarmap.eprints.org/

49

In general, Open Access should be considered ina broader context and needs to include a change
in the scientific culture towards more openness,
which could be achieved with encouragement andincentives. One incentive is to integrate Open Accessin the evaluation of a researcher’s career. At the
University of Liège, for example, only publications
deposited in the university’s Open Repository andBibliography repository50 are taken into account ina researcher’s career evaluation.51
The movement towards Open Access is transforming
and broadening into the emerging practice of open
scholarly communication, addressing not only
publications and data, but also scholarly outreach,research assessment, online collaborative
writing and even online collaborative discovery.52

This may lead to the constitution of a scholarlycommons allowing the free flow of knowledge
and data throughout the entire research cycle,
including discovery and analysis. This is goingon now as the Wikimedia approach describedin Figure OS.4 illustrates. At every level of thescholarly process new private and/or public
initiatives are in place or being created that allow
the scholarly process to be carried out differently
and where the Wikimedia layer stands for theefforts to capture all this in a “commons”.
Such a commons, however, as illustrated by
Figure OS.4, will compete with private initiatives
offering particular services at the different stages of
the research cycle, such as the research assessment
services offered by commercial operators.

Figure OS.4: Open Science: From Open Access to Open Scholarly Communication

Discovery

Elsevier

Analysis

Writing

Publication

Outreach

Assessment?

Springer Nature
Digital Science

GoogleWikimedia?

?

Source: http://innoscholcomm.silk.co50

http://orbi.ulg.ac.be/51

http://www.ulg.ac.be/cms/c_17700/fr/open-access
http://initiatives.exlibrisgroup.com/2013/05/a-mandate-for-open-accessuniversity-of.html

52

Bosman, Jeroen and Kramer, Bianca (2015): 101 innovations in scholarly
communication. [online]: http://innoscholcomm.silk.co/50?

Text and Data Mining
Text and Data Mining (TDM) is a set of methods
that use computers to automatically search, filter
and interpret large amounts of digital and online
content. Mining content to which researchers alreadyhave legal access is the automation of a processthat researchers have otherwise done manually for
hundreds of years. Since TDM is an emerging fieldthat comprises a set of different methods, it is still
difficult to quantify. Research is fragmented acrossmore than 28,000 peer-reviewed journals fromaround 10,000 different publishers. In addition, thereal benefits of TDM can be seen especially where
the required content comes from multiple sources.53
The European Commission estimates that thetechnological developments underpinning TDM will
have advanced enormously by 2030, creating vast

amounts of new and heterogeneous digital data,arising from initiatives such as free and open data
access policies, continued expansion of social media,
real-time sensory data feeds as the Internet of things
evolves as well as a result of new infrastructures andsocial platforms that allow experts and citizens to
produce large volumes of data.54
In order for the benefits that could be derived fromthese relatively new tools, techniques and technologies
to be fully developed, the legal uncertainties acrossdifferent fields of law, in particular copyright anddatabase rights, need to be addressed. This was
also one of the conclusions of an Expert Group on
TDM convened by the European Commission in 2013
as only a few countries in the world have adopted
or are in the process of adopting specific copyrightprovisions to introduce a data analysis exception (i.e.
TDM exception) in their legislation.55

Research-friendly copyright for Open Science and innovation in Europe
European researchers and innovators should have the explicit right to process on a large scale thecontent to which they have legal access. That is why the European Commission proposed on 9
December 2015 a mandatory exception for research in the EU copyright legislation.
This exception should overcome the current fragmented copyright regime across the EU, the lack ofclarity around copyright and ownership of derived works, and the inadequacy of licensing solutions.
These obstacles have so far hampered the use of technologies commonly known as Text and Data
Mining (TDM) in the EU. As a result, researchers – especially those from public interest researchorganisations – have felt discouraged to use such techniques to analyse vast amounts of digitalcontent. Scientific research is collaborative and knows no borders and Europe should not fall behind
other regions of the world, where TDM is already made easy.
The harmonisation of the copyright exception for scientific research purposes was identified as key forthe functioning of the Digital Single Market. The planned exception will help the scientific community
and innovative companies that have established collaboration with them – in particular in the case of
public-private partnerships – to make the best use of digital content they have already lawfully acquiredor obtained access to. It will help bring coherence among the EU’s 28 Member States and remove key
barriers to Open Science and Open Innovation. Researchers and innovators should be given the best
conditions to do their jobs. The exception proposed will be pivotal in spurring innovation and growthin Europe. The legislative package, including the exception for research, was launched in April 2016.

53

http://sparceurope.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/TDM-briefing-paperfinal.pdf

54

https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/news/european-commissionforesight-fiches-global-trends-2030

55

http://ec.europa.eu/research/innovation-union/pdf/TDM-report_from_the_expert_group-042014.pdf

51

Towards better, more efficient and more
Open Science

justify the demand that science should become
more efficient.

The impact of all these trends is already visible andalready affecting some of the most burning issues
in how research is carried out, such as the slownessof the publication process, increasing criticism of
the existing peer review system, and the challengeof reproducing reliable research results, all of which

Open Science has the potential to strengthen andenhance science by facilitating more transparency,
openness, networking and collaboration, and by
fostering interdisciplinary research. In being open,
science will be fully accountable for its use of
public resources.56

Figure OS.5: Towards ‘better science’ – Good, efficient and Open Science
researchgovernancechangesdeclaring competing interests
replication & reproducibility
 meaningful assessment
 effective quality checks
 credit where it is due no fraud, plagiarism



GOOD

connected tools & platforms
no publ. size restrictions
 null result publishing
EFFICIENT speed of publication
 (web)standards, IDs semantic discovery Re-useability
 versioning

technical
changes &standards

OPEN

open peer review open (lab)notes plain language open drafting open access CC-0/BY 

economic& copyrightchanges

Source: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2015/11/11/101-innovations-in-scholarly-communication/

Open Science can transform science into ‘better’science. Better science means making science(Figure OS.5):•• Good: by making science more credible
and replicable, for example by addressing
governance and scientific integrity;•• Efficient: by avoiding duplication of resources

Fostering Research Integrity
The growing scrutiny of research integrity constitutes
another key driver of Open Science. With evidence
coming to light of some cases where research resultsappear to be not replicable57, the re-use of data canhelp foster the replicability of studies.
56

This view is shared by a large majority of the respondents to the public
consultation on ‘Science 2.0: Science in Transition’ (2014): http://ec.europa.
eu/research/consultations/science-2.0/consultation_en.htm

57

The Economist, ‘How Science goes wrong’ The Economist, 19 October 2013: “Lastyear researchers at one biotech firm, Amgen, found they could reproduce justsix of 53 ‘landmark’ studies in cancer research. Earlier, a group at Bayer, a drug
company, managed to repeat just a quarter of 67 similarly important papers.
A leading computer scientist frets that three-quarters of papers in his subfield
are bunk. In 2010 roughly 80,000 patients took part in clinical trials based on
research that was later retracted because of mistakes or improprieties.”and optimising the re-useability of data; and,•• Open: by improving the accessibility of data andknowledge at all stages of the research cycle,
and enabling text and data mining by ensuring
the appropriate conditions within copyright law.

52

Research integrity, which can be defined as “theperformance of research to the highest standardsof professionalism and rigour, in an ethicallyrobust manner”58, is important to science because
it creates trust, and trust is at the heart of theresearch process. Researchers must be able to trust
and rely on each other’s work and “they must also
be trusted by society since they provide scientificexpertise that may impact people’s lives”. Thus,“research integrity has the potential to increase
the quality of research in the European researchecosystem, thereby increasing its overall
effectiveness and impact into the future”59.
Research integrity, considered by the Commission
as a prerequisite to scientific excellence, will
support Open Science in particular by promoting
behaviours leading to a better access to andsharing of available data. Research integrity canalso build trust between science and wider society,optimise returns on investment and protect the EU
and its interests. It therefore constitutes one of thepriorities of European research policy.60
The European Commission is developing a policy
on research integrity comprising two main pillars:

1. Minimising breaches of research integrity inactivities funded by Horizon 2020:
Horizon 2020 requires participants to meet thehighest standards of research integrity, as set out,
for instance, in the European Code of Conduct for
Research Integrity61.Various elements safeguard
adherence to these principles and enable thedetection of research misconduct, including different
tools to detect cases of misconduct during theevaluation process and the technical review ofproject proposals.

58

2. Increasing adherence to the highest standards ofresearch integrity in the research and innovation
system, in the EU and internationally
The Commission intends to increase awareness of
the importance of actively seeking a high level ofintegrity, to make available a tool kit to support
organizations in building or adapting their integrity
system and to contribute to the availability ofeffective training material. It is also financing
projects to identify the roots of research misconduct
and suitable responses.62 Several actions havebeen launched to promote higher levels of research
integrity in the EU and beyond, including cooperation
with stakeholders to review the European Code on
Research Integrity (ALLEA/ESF code); the creation ofa European Research Integrity research community;
promoting a research integrity culture throughcapacity building, awareness and skills; and efforts toincrease reproducibility, exchange of best practices
and international cooperation.
Making science more inclusive: Citizen Science
Open Science also aims to encourage the inclusionof non-institutional participants, in other words
the general public, in the scientific process. Citizen
science is “scientific work undertaken by membersof the general public, often in collaboration withor under the direction of professional scientists
and scientific institutions.” 63 Initiatives like Galaxy
Zoo and Zooniverse have shown that it is possible
to get hundreds of thousands of people to help
with scientific research. Zooniverse is produced,
maintained and developed by the Citizen Science
Alliance (CSA), whose member institutions workwith many academic and other partners around theworld to produce projects that use volunteers to help
scientists and researchers deal with the flood of datathat confronts them.

Science Europe Briefing Paper, “Research Integrity: What it Means, Why it isImportant and How we Might Protect it”, December 2015.

59

Idem.

60

This priority has been acknowledged by the European Council, which, on 1
December 2015 made several recommendations to the Commission, theMember States, the Scientific Community and other stakeholders: http://data.
consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-14201-2015-INIT/en/pdf

61European Science Foundation (ESF) and All European Academies(ALLEA) 2011: The European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity:
http://www.esf.org/fileadmin/Public_documents/Publications/Code_Conduct_
ResearchIntegrity.pdf

62See, for example, in the Horizon 2020 Work Programme 2014-2015, thecalls GARRI.9.2015 – Estimating the costs of research misconduct and thesocio-economic benefit of research integrity, and GARRI.10.2015- European
Ethics and Research Integrity Network, and in H2020 Work Programme
2016-2017, the call SwafS-16-2016: Mapping the Ethics and ResearchIntegrity Normative Framework.

63“Oxford English Dictionary List of New Words”. Oxford English Dictionary.
Retrieved 13 September 2014.

53

Citizens have also funded citizen labs based on
open source principles and community access toresearch. Genspace is a community biotechnology
laboratory in New York that provides extracurricularexperience for students, and encourages scientificentrepreneurship, particularly in the fields ofmolecular and synthetic biology.
Citizen Science is often linked with outreachactivities, science education or various formsof public engagement with science as a way topromote Responsible Research and Innovation.
DIY Science (Do It Yourself Science) covers many
trends, variously described as amateur, ‘garage’,‘citizens’, ‘extreme citizen’ and activist. Although
now small and marginal, they will surely grow,along with their challenges to mainstream
science. There will be problems to be resolved,
as established science loses its monopoly ofaccredited status in the provision of knowledge
and advice. But the challenge posed by DIY Scienceshould produce new thinking and new practices,enriching science in many ways as the establishedand newer streams interact.
Citizen Science is evolving very quickly, and‘mainstream science’ may well not have fully
understood the contribution that it is already making.

54

On the one hand, citizen scientists improve the qualityof data and scientific evidence. Purely at the level of‘collecting data’, they often provide a data-source
unknown to professional scientists, and they canoften provide perspectives, experience or informationthat the professional scientists don’t have.
On the other hand, Citizen Scientists often havea ‘direct’ interest at stake, be it in the fasterdevelopment of medicines or to gain better
insight in the quality of the local environments inwhich they live, to give but two examples. Citizen
scientists are also collaborating globally to address
societal challenges such as climate change or foodsecurity. Citizen Science can contribute to theCommission’s goal of Responsible Research andInnovation, as it reinforces public engagement andcan re-direct research agendas towards issues ofconcern to citizens.
This kind of citizen science is increasingly on
the agenda and it is planned that future work
programmes of Horizon 2020 will continue tosupport relevant initiatives at EU level. For instance,
the continuation and upscaling of various citizens’
observatories initiatives are foreseen, including an
inducement prize for new products and services
that will harness the data produced.

Citizens’ Observatories – WeSenseIt
Europe’s ability to mitigate and adapt to the effects of climate change is one of the challenges of ourtime. The number of people who will be affected by flooding is predicted to double over the next 70
years, with annual costs increasing from EUR 7.7bn to EUR 15bn. Traditional approaches to water cycle
monitoring have two major drawbacks. First, the density and resolution of the collected data is still too
low to describe the status of the water cycle (especially during anomalous events such as floods). Second,the communities affected play a passive role, usually at the end of the information chain.
The WeSenseIt project (2012-2016, www.wesenseit.eu/) is developing a citizen observatory ofwater that will allow citizens and communities to take on a new role in the information chain: a shift
from traditional one-way communication towards a two-way model in which citizens become active
stakeholders in capturing, evaluating and communicating information. This citizen observatory
leverages environmental data and knowledge (from both professionals and communities) to
manage water resources effectively and efficiently.
Citizens, such as volunteer flood wardens in the UK or civil protection volunteers in Italy, can help bytaking measurements using new apps currently being developed by the project and sending informationand images by phone. They can also help by reading existing sensors and sending authorities the data
via mobile apps. New technologies and approaches to water management are being tested and validated
in three EU countries: the UK, the Netherlands and Italy.
WeSenseIt also has a strong focus on creating new economic opportunities. One company within theConsortium is already commercialising a tool developed in 2013, just ten months into the project. The tool,
which carries out large scale social media analysis to help emergency responders during large scale floods,
found an application in monitoring large city-wide events in the UK. Events involving over 600 000 citizens
were monitored with excellent results, reflecting the scope of potential applications of this kind.

4. CONCLUSIONS
The research process of the future will be global,
networked and open. Many more actors will takepart in different ways and the traditional methods oforganising and rewarding research will also see manychanges. The essence of the science process – peer
review, discovering new frontiers - will not change,
but the way it is done will certainly be different.
Achieving the following objectives in the coming years
will enable European science to meet the challenges
and opportunities of the networked knowledge society,and create the kind of Open Science environment
described at the beginning of this chapter.
FAIR data sharing should be the default for funding
scientific research and all European researchers shouldbe able to deposit, access and analyse European
scientific data through the European Open Science Cloud.

Peer reviewed scientific publications should be freely
accessible. The evaluation of research careers should
fully acknowledge Open Science activities and funders
and stakeholders should have come to agreement on
how alternative metrics can complement or replace
the current system. All young scientists in Europe
should have the necessary skills and support to beOpen Scientists and all publicly-funded research in
the EU adheres to commonly agreed Open Science
standards of research integrity. A truly Open Science
will also see citizen scientists making a significant
contribution as valid producers of knowledge.
Open Science will be a better science, which will bebetter able to meet the many societal and economic
challenges that we face in the 21st century.

55

Opento the World

OPEN TO THE WORLD
Fostering international cooperation in research andinnovation is a strategic priority for the European
Union so that we can access the latest knowledge
and the best talent worldwide, tackle global societal
challenges more effectively, create business
opportunities in new and emerging markets, and use
science diplomacy as an influential instrument of
external policy.
The European Commission is active on several
fronts to help ensure that European researchand innovation are ‘Open to the World’. It is
leading several global initiatives and working
with international organisations; it is helping
develop the framework conditions that underpin
international cooperation; and it is maximisingsynergies with the EU’s external policies and theactivities of Member States. It has opened up

Horizon 2020 to researchers and innovators fromacross the world and it holds regular dialogues with
key international partner countries and regions on
science and technology cooperation.
These efforts have very practical aims in mind. Being‘Open to the World’ means striving to ensure that
EU research and innovation can work at a global
level for all of us. Whether mobilising EU funding
for a rapid and effective global research response
to outbreaks like Ebola or Zika; contributing to theevidence base for the International Panel on Climate
Change and COP21 negotiations as over a thousand
results from EU-funded research projects have done;
benchmarking innovative European solutions forgreen urban mobility in Latin America, or promoting
scientific cooperation in the Middle East through the
SESAME project.

“We need to be Open to the World! Europe is a global leader in science, and thisshould translate into a leading voice in global debates. To remain relevant andcompetitive, we need to engage more in science diplomacy and global scientificcollaboration. It is not sufficient to only support collaborative projects; we needto enable partnerships between regions and countries.
Challenges in areas like energy, health, food and water are global challenges.
And Europe should be leading the way in developing global research partnerships
to address these challenges. This means speaking with one voice, and close
coordination with Member States’ international collaborations.
But I would like to go much further and begin building a global research area. This
will not happen in one step, but through developing partnerships with other areas.”
Commissioner Carlos Moedas,“A new start for Europe: Opening up to an ERA of Innovation”, Brussels, 22 June 201559

1. THE CONCEPT IN EVOLUTION: THE INCREASING
IMPORTANCE OF INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION
While the globalisation of research and innovation is
not a new phenomenon, it has become increasingly
visible, particularly in terms of collaborative
research, international technology production, andthe worldwide mobility of researchers and circulationof knowledge.
The increased interaction between science andtechnology actors at world level is partly due to theemergence of new international players with large
research and innovation capacities, but also to astronger political focus on addressing global challenges.
As more research and innovation is performed outside
Europe, the EU will need to access this knowledge.
And to remain a major global player, the EU must
promote itself as an attractive location for carryingout research and innovation and be successful in the
global competition for talent, while at the same timepreserving its economic interests, notably as regards
intellectual property rights and standards.

Global challenges are important drivers for researchand innovation. Our planet has finite resources which
need to be cared for sustainably; climate change andinfectious diseases do not stop at national borders,and food security needs to be ensured across theglobe. The Union needs to strengthen its dialogues
with international partners to build critical mass fortackling these challenges.
The world is becoming both more R&D-intensive andmultipolar, and the relative weight of the EU in thisnew global R&D landscape is falling. While the EU
and United States together represented nearly twothirds of global R&D expenditure in 2000, this share
had shrunk to less than half by 2013.
The EU and US shares of world expenditure on R&D
fell from 25.8% to 20.4% and from 37.6% to 27.2%
respectively, which is mainly due to the rapid riseof China, which more than quadrupled its sharebetween 2000 and 2013, from 4.6% to 20%. Figure
OW.1 shows the trend in the distribution of world
GERD (Gross Domestic Expenditure on R&D).

Figure OW.1: % distribution of world GERD(1), 2000 and 2013

2000

2013

Rest ofthe World
BRIS(2)
7.7%
6.2%
China
4.6%

Rest ofthe World
25.8%

EU

Developed 18.1%
Asian
Economies(3)BRIS(2)

7.8%
8.6%

20.4%

EU

China 20.0%
27.2%
37.6%

UnitedStatesDeveloped Asian
Economies(3)16.0%

UnitedStates

Source: Science, research and innovation performance of the EU 2016 - A contribution to the open innovation, open science, open
to the world agenda, European Commission 2016, ISBN: 978-92-79-49557-1
Data: Eurostat, OECD, UNESCO					Notes: (1)The % shares were calculated from estimated values in current PPS€. (2)BR+RU+IN+ZA. (3)JP+KR+SG+TW.

60

As a result of increasing R&D investments, a growing
number of international partners have been expanding
their scientific production. In the last decade, thegeographical distribution of knowledge production
has changed significantly: while Europe remains theworld’s leading producer of scientific knowledge, aheadof the US, some emerging countries have also become
major producers of knowledge. For example, China
increased its share of world scientific publications from
6% to 19.5% between 2000 and 2013, overtaking theUnited States (19.1%) as second biggest knowledge
producer in the world, with the EU share at 27.3%.
In this changing and challenging landscape, Europe has
been able to maintain its lead in terms of highly citedscientific publications (see Figure OW.2), implying thatit has continued to produce the very best science evenwhen other parts of the world have increased their R&D
investments much more.

Figure OW.2: World share of highly cited scientific publications(1), 2000 and 2010

2000(2)Israel, 0.8%
EFTA, 2.1%
South Korea, 1.1%
Japan
6.2%
China, 2.6%

Rest ofthe World
12.6%
United Kingdom, 8.6%

33.2%

Germany, 6.7%

EU

41.2%

UnitedStatesIsrael, 0.7%
EFTA, 2.1%
South Korea, 2.2%
Japan, 3.5%

Rest ofthe World

France, 4.4%
Italy, 2.8%
Spain, 1.7%
Netherlands, 2.4%
Sweden, 1.7%
Other Member States, 5.0%

2010(3)

16.7%
United Kingdom, 6.8%
Germany, 5.8%

China

UnitedStates

11.9%

32.1%

30.8%

EU

France, 3.7%
Italy, 3.3%
Spain, 2.7%
Netherlands, 2.4%
Sweden, 1.2%
Other Member States, 6.3%

Source: Science, research and innovation performance of the EU 2016
Data: Science-Metrix (Canada), based on Scopus database
Notes: (1)Fractional counting method. (2)Scientific publications 2000, with citation window 2000-2003. (3)Scientific publications
2010, with citation window 2010-2013.

61

Evidence shows that stronger international
collaborations have a clear positive impact on
the overall performance of national research andinnovation systems. The Average Relative Citations
ARC) of publications (see Figure OW.3) is an indicatorof the scientific impact of papers produced by agiven entity (in this case, a country) relative to theworld average. An ARC value above 1 means that agiven entity is cited more frequently than the world
average, while a value below 1 means the opposite.

For all research and innovation key players, theARC of international co-publications is much higher
than that of single country co-publications or single
author publications. Furthermore, only the ARC ofinternational co-publications scores above 1 in all
countries and regions. This means that, overall,international co-publications have a higher scientificimpact than the world average.

Figure OW.3: Average Relative Citations (ARC) of publications by type of co-operation, 2010
2.0

1.5

1.0

0.5

0.0
Single author publications

United States

Single country co-publications

EU

South Korea

International co-publications

Japan

China

Source: Science, research and innovation performance of the EU 2016
Data: Science-Metrix (Canada), based on Scopus database

The United States remains the EU’s main partnerin scientific collaboration, as shown by the numberof international co-publications (see Figure OW.4).
EU-China scientific collaborations have increased
significantly, but not as much as for US-China.

62

South Korea and China tend to collaborate morewith the US than with the EU. This seems to suggestthat the United States has been able to take greater
advantage of the emerging research capacities ofAsian economies than the EU has.

Figure OW.4: International scientific collaborations, 2000 and 2013

2013

100%

2000

80%
60%
40%
20%
0%

EU

EU

UnitedStates

Japan

China

United States

Japan

South
Korea

EU

China

UnitedStatesSouth Korea

Japan

China

South
Korea

Rest of the world

Source: Science, research and innovation performance of the EU 2016
Data: DG Research and Innovation, based on Scopus database
Note: Elements of estimation were involved in the compilation of the data.

Despite the increasing internationalisation oftechnological collaborations, compared to the UnitedStates, Europe is not taking full advantage of international
networks. International technological collaborations playa key role in the innovation process by allowing firms
to access a broader set of competences, resources
and skills. Patents with foreign co-inventors may be
used as a measure of the internationalisation of theresearch and innovation system and of the exchange
of knowledge between research and innovation actors(see Figure OW.5). Technological collaboration atinternational level has intensified in the last decadeboth in the United States and the EU. The US has
overtaken the EU in terms of share of patents resulting
from international collaborations and the gap between
the two countries seems to be increasing.

Figure OW.5: Share (%) of patents with foreign co-inventor(s) in total patent applicatons (WIPO PCT),
2000 and 2012
14
12
10

%

8
6
4
2
0

United States

Japan

South Korea

EU

United States

China

EU

South Korea

China

Rest of the world

Japan

2000

Source: Science, research and innovation performance of the EU 2016
Data: OECD

63

Countries such as China, South Korea and Japan rely
relatively more on their own research and innovation
systems than on international co-inventions, althoughin absolute terms the number of international coinventions has significantly increased from 2000 to2012 (China from 140 to 1,598 ; South Korea from86 to 365; Japan from 552 to 844).
Open to the World: the EU strategy
for global Research and Innovationcooperation and science diplomacy
The strategy64 for EU international cooperation in
research and innovation, published in September 2012
and welcomed by the European Council and European
Parliament, aims to strengthen the EU’s researchand innovation excellence and attractiveness and its
economic and industrial competitiveness, to tackle global
societal challenges, and to support its external policies.
The strategy is driven by the importance of cooperatinginternationally to give Europe access to the best talent,knowledge and resources wherever they are located; totackle global societal challenges in the most effective
way in a partnership approach; to help establish newopportunities for European high-tech industries throughparticipation in global value chains and access to newand emerging markets; and to have a leading voice inglobal debates and developments.
To increase the effectiveness of international
cooperation, while avoiding a wasteful fragmentationof efforts, the Commission prioritises actions of criticalmass in terms of scale/resources and scope/coverage.
Priority areas for international engagement are
identified on the basis of the following criteria:
1. Research and innovation capacity
2. Access to markets and their impact on EU
competitiveness3. Contribution to the EU’s international commitments
4. Legal and administrative frameworks in place toengage in cooperation.
All available instruments are put to use to maximise
the impact of international cooperation on researchand innovation. Horizon 2020 is the main vehicle,
fully open to participants from across the world andwith many topics specifically targeting international
cooperation. Cooperation takes place in research andinnovation projects, networking between projects,
joint or coordinated calls, and specific joint initiatives.
Increasingly, non-funding instruments are being used
to support the objectives of the strategy. These include,in particular, cooperation with Member States andAssociated Countries through the Strategic Forum forInternational Science and Technology Cooperation (SFIC)
as well as policy dialogues on S&T cooperation with key
international partner countries, regions and organisations.
This approach also involves the use of science, researchand innovation cooperation to support the objectives ofother EU policies, in particular external policies wherescience diplomacy can be used to build bridges between
people and nations and encourage peaceful relations.

“I believe science diplomacy is the torch that can light the way, where otherkinds of politics and diplomacy have failed. A torch to illuminate how we canprogress in science and innovation side by side. The torch that brightens adoorway to cooperation and communication that is never closed.
I want science diplomacy to play a leading role in our global outreach for its
uniting power. Certainly with our closest partners, but, even more so, where it canmake an even greater difference: where the political situation is more complex.”Commissioner Carlos Moedas,“The EU approach to science diplomacy”, Washington, 1 June 201564

COM(2012) 497: Enhancing and focusing EU international cooperation in
research and innovation: A strategic approach, http://ec.europa.eu/research/
iscp/pdf/policy/com_2012_497_communication_from_commission_to_
inst_en.pdf#view=fit&pagemode=none

64

2. THE LINK TO
OPEN INNOVATION AND OPEN SCIENCE
To maximise their potential, the main componentsof the ‘Open Innovation’ and ‘Open Science’ policies
should also be ‘Open to the World’.
For instance, EU policy initiatives such as
Horizon 2020 or the European Fund for Strategic
Investments (EFSI) should also attract international
partners to invest in research and innovation in
Europe; initiatives should also be open to partneringwith entities outside Europe.
Open Science is making strides across the world
and will be able to fulfil its greatest potential if wecooperate with partners on issues such as open
access and data.
International collaboration plays an increasingly
important role both in improving the competitivenessof research and innovation systems and in fostering
new knowledge production worldwide. See also thesection “Thematic cooperation targeting new value
chains and growing markets”, below.
Furthermore, the increasing number, scope andcomplexity of global challenges require more thanever international collaboration across disciplines
and sectors to tackle challenges such as climatechange, resource scarcity, or infectious diseases.
For example, the European Commission took the
initiative to set up the Global Research Collaboration
for Infectious Disease Preparedness (GloPID-R)65 thatbrings together funding organisations on a global
scale for an effective research response to major
outbreaks of infectious diseases with pandemic
potential. It has proven its value in the Ebola
outbreak66 as well as the Zika outbreak67, being able
to mobilise a global research response with effective
collaboration rather than competition or duplication.

65

http://www.glopid-r.org/

66

https://ec.europa.eu/research/health/index.cfm?pg=area&areaname=ebola

67

https://ec.europa.eu/research/health/index.cfm?pg=area&areaname=zika65

3. OPEN TO THE WORLD IN
THE COMMISSION’S NEW PRIORITIESLeading multilateral initiatives andworking with international organisations
to tackle global societal challenges
Very often international cooperation to tackle
societal challenges in areas like health, food, energy
and water is best implemented through global
multilateral initiatives where solutions can be
developed and deployed more effectively.
The Commission is leading the way in many global
research partnerships to tackle societal challenges.
The results of EU research and innovation contributeto the development and implementation ofimportant international commitments such as the
UN Convention for Climate Change, the Convention
on Biological Diversity, the 2030 Agenda for
Sustainable Development, and Resolutions of theWorld Health Organisation.
For instance, one important milestone in thedevelopment of international climate policy was
the adoption of the International Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) 5th Assessment Report that provided
the evidence base for the COP21 negotiations. Morethan one thousand highly relevant publications fromprojects funded by the EU’s Framework Programme
for Research were assessed in this Report68, withparticularly relevant contributions in areas suchas sea-level rise, ocean acidification and in theassessment of possible mitigation pathways. Anotherexample is the UN-Habitat programme69 promotingsocially and environmentally sustainable cities with
science, technology and innovation as a central meansof implementation and a clear recognition of theimportance of international cooperation in researchand innovation to foster sustainable urbanisation.
A significant proportion of knowledge deriving frommedical and health research often does not reachthe patients in question, and successful treatments
are sometimes not widely provided. These are
the consequences of poor understanding of thecomplexity of implementation and the context inwhich the intervention is proposed, as well as apoor involvement of the people who are responsible
for the delivery of care. In this context, the Global
Alliance for Chronic Diseases (GACD)70 focuses on
applying the best healthcare interventions, targeted
to different populations, geographical settings andsocioeconomic contexts. It therefore fills the huge
gap between providing the evidence base for policy
and the actual implementation of the policy inreal world settings. The ten international funders
that participate in the GACD support collaborative
research among low- and middle-income and highincome countries on low cost interventions to build
capacity in research and health care delivery tofight chronic diseases, and foster a sustainable andsignificant reduction in illness, disability, and deatharound the world.
The International Rare Diseases Research Consortium(IRDiRC)71 brings together funding agencies andresearchers from across the world to increase
investments in research on rare diseases. This is an
excellent example of how it is necessary to join forcesinternationally to tackle a problem that unfortunately
does not reach a critical mass in a single (national)
research system. 35 funding bodies from 40 countries
are sponsoring research projects with the overall aimof delivering 200 new therapies for rare diseases andthe means to diagnose most rare diseases by 2020.
Tracking climate and environmental change worldwide
requires timely and accurate Earth observation
data, which in turn requires appropriate policies andinfrastructure to gather and manage the information.
The Group on Earth Observations (GEO), which
implements the Global Earth Observation System of
Systems (GEOSS) and the Belmont Forum with its
Collaborative Research Action on ‘E-infrastructureand data management’ are both supporting common
data management principles, including open and fullaccess to data, to be implemented worldwide throughjoint collaborative actions.

68

IPCC (2013 and 2014), 5th Assessment Report: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/70

http://www.gacd.org/

69

http://unhabitat.org/

71

http://www.irdirc.org/

66

The Belmont Forum aims to deliver the knowledge
needed to avoid and adapt to detrimental
environmental change. It is composed of some
20 funding agencies from industrialised andemerging countries, co-chaired by the Commission
and the Sao Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP).
The Forum expedites the delivery of theenvironmental research needed to remove criticalbarriers to sustainability by aligning and mobilisinginternational resources. Collaborative researchactions following joint calls have included Freshwater
Security, Food Safety and Security, and Blue Growth.
In 2016 two new actions are planned on Food, Water
and Energy for Sustainable Global Urbanisation andon Transformations to Sustainability. As a memberof the Science and Technology Alliance for Global
Sustainability, the Forum also co-designed the
Future Earth initiative to create a global, independent
platform for scientific collaboration on global change
research and sustainability, integrating and replacing
currently disparate international programmes.
The Group on Earth Observations (GEO), is avoluntary partnership of 102 governments and92 participating organisations. Together, the GEO
community is creating a Global Earth Observation
System of Systems (GEOSS) that will link Earthobservation resources world-wide across different
areas – including Biodiversity and Ecosystem
Sustainability, Disaster Resilience and Water
Resources Management - and put those resourcesat the service of better informed decision-making
for citizens and for business. The new GEO mandate(2016-2025) brings new opportunities to reinforce
the EU’s international standing and diplomatic
influence on the global sustainability agenda and to
stimulate growth and jobs in Europe in the context
of the digital economy.
The Transatlantic Ocean Research Alliance is anothergood example of a recent initiative to pool researchknowledge on an international issue. Its goal is towork together across the Atlantic in order to better
understand and predict major ocean and interlinked
Arctic processes and to promote the sustainable
management of resources. The Alliance is based on
the Galway Statement72 signed in 2013 by the EU,
its Member States, the US and Canada.

“We need to build and invest in a blue economy that both protects andharvests our oceans’ abundance. So that this generation may prosper andfuture generations still reap the benefits. Together, we can achieve this byimproving our ocean observation and forecasting capacity, by increasing ourunderstanding of ocean dynamics. All the while, disseminating knowledge ofthis valuable resource to citizens.“
Commissioner Carlos Moedas“The Atlantic – Our Shared Vision, European Parliament”, Brussels, 16 April 2015

A more recent example is the global ‘Mission
Innovation’ initiative that aims to reinforce public
and private investment in clean energy innovation, todevelop and deploy breakthrough technologies andto make clean energy widely affordable. It gathers
20 countries seeking to double the financing for clean
energy research. The EU wishes to join this initiative,
given that it has already doubled its allocation

to low carbon related energy research from theSeventh Framework Programme to Horizon 2020
and that it has committed to invest at least 35% of
Horizon 2020 in climate-related activities.
Another example is in fusion energy research, whereinternational cooperation has taken place for many
years. This is culminating in the construction of ITER73
72

https://ec.europa.eu/research/iscp/pdf/galway_statement_atlantic_ocean_cooperation.pdf

10

www.iter.org

67

in France that, when completed, will demonstrate theviability of fusion as an energy source. Europe also
hosts the world’s largest operational fusion device,
the Joint European Torus (JET). JET has been aninternational centre for fusion energy research fordecades and highlights how EU fusion research isand continues to be open to the world.
Further action should enhance the role of the
EU in global multilateral fora and internationalorganisations. A stronger and more coherent EU
strategy vis-à-vis the activities of such fora andorganisations should give the EU a leading voice
to push for larger global investments in innovative
solutions to the global societal challenges that areat the top of the EU’s priorities list.
Improving the framework conditions forengaging in international cooperation
Science and innovation are global endeavours
and researchers should be able to work together
smoothly across borders, particularly on large-scalecommon challenges. The strategic approach to EU
international cooperation aims to develop common
principles and adequate framework conditions forengaging in cooperation.
The European Commission is proactive in addressing
obstacles to the efficient international cooperationof researchers and innovators by ensuring fair andequitable framework conditions such as reciprocal
access to programmes, mechanisms for co-funding,mutual access to resources, and efficient and fair
intellectual property rights systems.
A particular focus of political dialogues underinternational science and technology (S&T)
agreements is to stimulate and assist partnercountries to set up co-funding mechanisms for their
participants in Horizon 2020 actions. So far, sucharrangements exist in several partner countries
including South Korea, Mexico, China, Russia, Japan,
Australia, regions of Brazil, and the province ofQuebec, Canada.

68

A Global Research Area
One focus has been on the concept of a Global
Research Area where researchers and innovators
are able to work together smoothly with colleagues
worldwide and where researchers, scientificknowledge and technology circulate as freely as
possible.
The external dimension of the European Research
Area is serving as an example and benchmark
towards more coherent and efficient collaborationin research and innovation at global level. In thisway Europe is reinforcing its position as a global
research powerhouse, to attract and retain the best
researchers, boost competitiveness, support market
uptake through confidence building, and encourage
future cooperation with global research partners.
The building of a Global Research Area is proceeding
step-by-step with different priorities and actions
that vary from one region to another, based on the
EU’s specific objectives for each region or group ofcountries in question.
Case-study: EU-CELAC
The EU-CELAC (Community of Latin America andCaribbean States) Common Research Area was
declared a common objective at the June 2015
Summit between the two regions, to improve thelevel and intensity of cooperation in research andinnovation. The Common Research Area will be basedon three pillars: increased mobility of researchers;
improved access to research infrastructures anddata; and jointly addressing common challenges suchas environment and climate change, sustainableurbanisation, bio-economy, health and ICT.
Case-study: PRIMA
Another example is cooperation in the Mediterranean
region on how to ensure the sustainable provisionof vital resources such as water and food. PRIMA,
the Partnership for Research and Innovation in the
Mediterranean Area, involves several countries andtheir research communities on both sides of theMediterranean. Rapid demographic, socio-economic,

and climate changes are threatening the sustainable
development of the Mediterranean region, especiallythe capacity of its agriculture to cope with increased
demand for food production in a scenario of water
scarcity and increasing competition for water use
between different sectors. To address this challenge,
EU and non-EU countries are engaging in a significant
and well-coordinated research effort at regional
scale to develop and deploy innovative solutions forsustainable food production and water use.
Case study: China
The October 2015 Joint Committee on EU-China Scienceand Technology cooperation addressed progress in thepriority areas of food, agriculture and biotechnology,
sustainable urbanisation including energy; transport,

environment and ICT; aviation; fusion and fission,and space technology and Earth observation. The
Committee also addressed the framework conditions
for cooperation and underlined its commitment to
the EU-China Innovation Cooperation Dialogue, which
in June 2015 discussed respective innovation policies
and agreed to ensure reciprocal access to respective
research and innovation funding programmes throughparticipation rules based on equal treatment, timely andclear information to participants and regular exchangeof data. Agreement was also reached on setting up
a new co-funding mechanism to support mainland
China-based research and innovation organisations
participating in joint EU-China projects under
Horizon 2020. The budget ceiling of the mechanism is
200 million RMB or 28 million euro per year.

“First, we should boost our investment in research and innovation cooperation
between our regions. Horizon 2020 is open to international cooperation.
We have invested a lot in collaborative research projects involving Chineseparticipants so far. A co-funding mechanism to boost EU-China cooperation in
research and innovation has been agreed with the Chinese Ministry of Scienceand Technology. Second, we should create better regulatory conditions to allow
our researchers and companies to innovate and to cooperate across borders.
Third, with the increasing role that scientific evidence will play in the European
policy making process, dialogue with China could develop complementary
approaches to face global societal challenges with science policy. Fourth, ongoing cooperation in the area of large research infrastructures is of increasing
importance globally. The EU and China are already cooperating in very
ambitious infrastructures programmes, such as the International Thermonuclear
Experimental Reactor (ITER), but there remains plenty of scope for further
cooperation on both continents.“
Commissioner Carlos Moedas, “Promoting excellence through enhanced EU-China researcher
mobility and cooperation”, Beijing, 7 September 2015

Further action should continue to build a Global
Research Area, proceeding area-by-area to shape
partnerships with Member States, AssociatedCountries and international partner countries, regions
and organisations.

69

Research and innovation as an agent ofintegration of neighbouring countries
The focus of the European Union’s cooperation with
its neighbours on research and innovation is to foster
integration into, or alignment with, the European
Research Area, including through their possible
association to Horizon 2020. This is contributing todeveloping a ‘Common Knowledge and Innovation
Space’, that includes helping to improve the researchand innovation competences of these countries74.
Cooperation occurs in close coordination with the
instruments of the enlargement and neighbourhood
policies that help to build up research capacity.
Research and innovation funding focuses on finding
innovative solutions to the challenges faced by theEU’s neighbours (see Figure OW.6).
Efforts are also being made in the context of the
Horizon 2020 Policy Support Facility (PSF) thatprovides Member States and countries associatedto the programme with practical support to design,
implement and evaluate reforms that enhance thequality of their research and innovation investments,
policies and systems. On request from national
authorities, the PSF offers a broad range of expertiseand services including peer reviews of national
research and innovation systems. Peer reviews ofMoldova and Ukraine will be concluded in 2016,leading to concrete recommendations to the national
authorities on the reforms needed to strengthen theirresearch and innovation systems.
Another example of cooperation with the EU’s
neighbours is EaPConnect75 which will provide Eastern
Partnership countries (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus,
Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine) with huge broadband
capacity dedicated to scientific research. This will beachieved by improving the current interconnections
with the European GEANT network, the mostpowerful for research and education worldwide. The
objective will be to provide broadband Wi-Fi accesson university campuses, and access to a wide rangeof scientific publications and databases, helping
integrate the Eastern partnership countries into the
EU and international scientific communities.

“It is a great honour to have signed Ukraine’s Association Agreement to
Horizon 2020 this morning. The first time that Ukraine has been associated to an EU
programme. A historic day. A remarkable achievement. I warmly welcome the further
integration of Ukraine into the European Research Area.
The list of benefits of today’s association agreement to Ukraine and to theEuropean Union is both long and significant. It will now be possible for Ukraine tohost European Research Council grants. It will now be possible to share research
infrastructure. Ukrainian researchers will be eligible to apply for all mobility schemes
and fellowships of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions. Ukrainian businesses will
now have access to the Horizon 2020 instrument for Small and Medium-sizedEnterprises. The list goes on. And the EU is excited to learn from you and to engage
with you. We look forward to strengthening our cooperation and growing together.”Commissioner Carlos Moedas
Ukraine Association Agreement to Horizon 2020, Kyiv, 20 March 201574

The European Neighbourhood Policy governs the EU’s relations with 16 of
the EU’s closest Eastern and Southern Neighbours. To the South: Algeria,
Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Palestine, Syria and Tunisia
and to the East: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine.
Of these, Israel, Moldova and Ukraine are associated to Horizon 2020 andTunisia, Georgia and Armenia are in the process of finalising associationagreements (situation as of 4 February 2016)7075

https://www.eapconnect.eu/

Figure OW.6: Cooperation with countries in the Eastern Partnership, Western Balkans,Southern Neighbourhood and Mediterranean

BELARUSUKRAINE

MONACOBOSNIA AND
SERBIAHERZEGOVINA**MONTENEGRO KOSOVO
FYROM
ALBANIAGEORGIA

TURKEYTUNISIA

MOROCCOALGERIALEBANON
PALESTINE*ISRAELLIBYAARMENIA AZERBAIJANSYRIAJORDAN

EGYPT

MAURITANIA* This designation shall not be construed as recognition of a State of Palestine and is without prejudice to the individual positions of the Member Stateson this issue.
**This designation is without prejudice to position on status, and is in line with UN Security Council Resolution 1244/99 and the International Court ofJustice Opinion on the Kosovo declaration of independence.

Bi-regional dialogues between the EU and:Eastern Partnership (Belarus, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine)
Western Balkan Platform (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Montenegro,
Serbia, Kosovo)Southern Neighbourhood (Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Palestine, Syria, Tunisia)
Union for the Mediterranean (Albania, Algeria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Mauritania,
Monaco, Montenegro, Morocco, Palestine, Syria, Tunisia and Turkey)

Strengthening synergies with
the EU’s external policies
The challenges that Europe faces today haveincreasingly interlinked external and internal
dimensions – migration, radicalisation and energy
security being cases in point. The urgency of thesechallenges requires swift political decisions and joint
international responses.

Science and technology cooperation is very often an
important element in deepening relations with key
partners of the EU. The European Commission holds
regular science and technology cooperation dialogues
with some 20 key international partner countries, aswell as high level policy dialogues with the main world
regions. These dialogues cover thematic research andinnovation cooperation as well as actions to ensurefavourable and equitable conditions for the efficient
cooperation of researchers and innovators (see Figures
OW.7 and OW.8).

71

Figure OW.7: Scientific and Technologic Cooperation Agreements between the EU / Euratom
		 and the rest of the world

Scientific and Technological Cooperation Agreements with
the EU: Algeria, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China,
Egypt, India, Japan, Jordan, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Russia,
South Africa, South Korea, Tunisia, Ukraine, USA.
Cooperation under the Euratom Treaty: Argentina, Australia,
Brazil, Canada, China, India, Japan, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Russia,
South Africa, South Korea, Ukraine, USA, Uzbekistan.

Figure OW.8: Cooperation with Latin America and Caribbean, Africa, Middle East and South-East Asia
LEBANONWESTERN
SAHARA*LEBANON

QATAR
MYANMAR

YEMEN

QATAR

WESTERN
SAHARA*YEMENMADAGASCARMADAGASCAR(Bahrain, Kuwa

(ad hoc

72

CELAC-Community of Latin American and Caribbean States(33 states, http://www.celacinternational.org/)
African Union (54 states, http://www.au.int/en/countryprofiles)

MYANMAR

Gulf Cooperation Council (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar,
Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates)
MENA-Middle East and North Africa (ad hoc; Algeria, Bahrain,
Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Qatar,
Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, Yemen)
ASEAN-Association of South-East Asian Nations (Indonesia,
Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Brunei, Vietnam, Laos,
Myanmar, Cambodia)*The boundaries and names shown and the designations used on this map
do not imply official endorsement or acceptance.

(Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar,(ad hoc; Algeria, Bahrain,73

As regards science and technology cooperation with
developing countries, the emphasis is on building
partnerships, in particular bi-regional partnerships, tocontribute to the sustainable development of theseregions and address challenges such as climate change,sustainable agriculture, food security and health.
The effective soft power tool of science diplomacy is
being used more and more to support external policy
objectives for peace, security, humanitarian aid, andsocial and economic development. Science diplomacy
is the use of science to prevent conflicts and crises,
underpin policy making, and improve international
relations in conflict areas where the universal languageof science can open new channels of communication
and build trust. Scientific evidence and advice are
increasingly indispensable for anticipating needs andevents and for making informed, forward-looking
foreign policy decisions.
Science and scientific values of rationality, transparency
and universality can provide a common language andcommon basis for engagement and trust, even so far asbuilding better relationships between potential parties
to a conflict. Science diplomacy may take several forms,
for example direct diplomatic efforts by scientists as in
the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran76; scientific advice todiplomats (e.g. game theory, cognitive psychology)
on negotiating positions and approaches that arelikely to be successful; or research collaborations
between scientific communities in the various
countries involved that are likely to increase mutual
understanding and trust, indirectly strengthening
civil society and evidence-based policy-making andinfluencing politicians to follow in the same direction.
Case-study: SESAME
The Synchrotron-light for Experimental Scienceand Applications in the Middle East (SESAME) is
an international project launched in 2003 under
the auspices of UNESCO with the aim of using
science diplomacy to foster a culture of peace andcooperation in the broader Middle East. It is expected
to be operational by 2017. SESAME’s partners
include Bahrain, Cyprus, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Jordan,
Pakistan, Palestine and Turkey, with the EU, France,
Germany, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, UK,76

Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on Iran’s nuclear programme, 14 July 2015

74

Brazil, China, Japan, Kuwait, Switzerland, Russia andthe US as observers.
The project is building a research infrastructure,
fostering science and technology excellence in theregion and tackling the scientific brain drain throughworld-class research in subjects ranging from
biology, archaeology and medicine, to materials
science, physics, chemistry, and life sciences. At
the same time, it is building scientific and cultural
bridges between different countries. Already morethan 350 scientists from the region have used
SESAME’s facilities, even before its completion.
SESAME is modelled on CERN, one of the pioneersin Europe of using science as a way of fostering
a culture of dialogue and cooperation. The projectis based on expertise, technical assistance andequipment made available by European partner
laboratories. The EU’s key technical contribution is
the state-of-the-art magnet system for the mainstorage ring of SESAME, which is considered thecatalyst for the realisation of the project. The EU
has foreseen further support to enhance SESAME’s
training capacities.
Case-studies: Science diplomacy
across the globe
Another example of international science diplomacy
is cooperation in the Arctic. Here, EU-driven
international scientific cooperation and researchand innovation dialogues often precede politicalnegotiations on complex issues, ranging from theimpacts of climate change to new transport routes.
Cooperation in scientific research is also a key
element of the diplomatic effort towards obtaining
EU observer status at the Arctic Council77.
The BONUS initiative78 can also be viewed through theangle of science diplomacy. This initiative strives foran economically and ecologically prosperous Baltic
Sea region, where resources and goods are usedsustainably and where the long-term managementof the region is based on sound knowledge.

77

http://www.arctic-council.org/

78

http://www.bonusportal.org/

Another example is the European and Developing
Countries Clinical Trials Partnership (EDCTP2)79
that aims to accelerate the development of new
or improved drugs, vaccines, microbicides anddiagnostics against poverty-related and neglected
infectious diseases in sub-Saharan Africa. EDCTP2
demonstrates the opportunities that science,research and innovation offer to bridge politicalborders and cultural differences, with knowledge,
expertise and know-how flowing between countries.
Research and innovation are also an important tool in
dealing with disasters – from preventing and detecting
emerging threats, to assessing our vulnerabilities, toenhancing resilience and recovery. For example, theinnovative system developed by the EU REAKT projectmonitors sudden increases in traffic on the European
Mediterranean Seismological Centre which allows theorigin and location of earthquake activity to be identified
within just two minutes. Combined with data from online
public behaviour, this enables the system to swiftly map
out areas where tremors have been felt, where potential
damage may occur, and where relief may be needed.

In the future, science diplomacy should be used
more broadly as an influential instrument of the EU’s
external policy. International research and innovationcooperation leading to common standards, scientificexchange and mobility, the sharing of resources andfacilities, and scientific advice to diplomats and diplomat
scientists should help underpin good governance andpolicy-making and build mutual understanding andtrust. As such, science diplomacy should become anelement of the renewed Global Strategy on the EU’s
Common Foreign and Security Policy80.
Greater synergies with theactions of Member States
The European Commission and the Member States
have made considerable progress in deepening theirpartnership on enhancing and focussing international
cooperation actions, particularly in the context of
the Strategic Forum for International Science andTechnology Cooperation (SFIC)81 that, as an advisory
body, is playing an active role as an exchange
platform and in networking with stakeholders.

“Our interest in science diplomacy is not a fleeting interest. In Europe, we knowthat investing in others, learning from others and being challenged by others, isthe surest way to spark innovation. Innovation that Europe and the Middle East
need to remain secure and competitive in global markets.
Science diplomacy is as much about innovation in economic policy, as it isabout neighbourhood policy, or even foreign policy. We no longer live in a world
where one country can stand alone. Creating an enlarged area of scientific andtechnological excellence − preventing intellectual migration – brings about
economic stability. That stability gives young people the space they need to
dream, aspire and develop. Stability brings with it confidence and security.”
Commissioner Carlos Moedas, “Addressing shared challenges through Science Diplomacy:
the case of EU–Middle East regional cooperation”, Amman, Jordan, 13 April 201579

http://www.edctp.org/

80

http://europa.eu/globalstrategy/81

http://ec.europa.eu/research/iscp/index.cfm?pg=sfic-general75

Structured policy coordination between the Commission
and SFIC takes place in view of Joint S&T Cooperation
Committee meetings and high level policy dialogues
with international partner countries and regions. The
Forum is also providing input and feedback to multiannual roadmaps for cooperation with key countries
and regions, and country-specific Working Groups
are contributing to a more coherent research andinnovation cooperation strategy for these countries.

Further action to improve synergies with the actionsof Member States could include analysis and mutual
learning as regards their international strategies andinitiatives; structured policy coordination, and the
involvement of more partners from around the worldin actions such as Joint Programming Initiatives.

Member States have also contributed to improving
framework conditions for research and innovationcooperation across the world through policy
dialogues with the EU’s partners, as well as throughinvolvement in global fora such as the OECD Global
Science Forum and the Global Research Council.

The main reason for cooperating with industrialised
countries and emerging economies is to accessnew sources of knowledge that will help us todevelop enabling technologies, jointly tackle global
challenges through common innovative solutions,and increase the EU’s competitiveness.

Another aspect of cooperation with Member Statesand Associated Countries is where the EU participatesin their joint research programmes, aiming tointegrate national programmes and carry out joint
activities, such as in the European and Developing
Countries Clinical Trials Partnership (EDCTP). SFIC is
also engaging with the Group on Joint Programming
to strengthen the internationalisation activities of
Joint Programming Initiatives.

Targeted international cooperation in a range ofthematic areas is providing businesses in the EU withnew business opportunities and access to researchand innovation capacities, new value chains andgrowing markets beyond Europe.

Cooperation is also carried out through initiatives
such as the Strategic Energy Technology (SET) Plan in
the area of energy research and innovation to ensurea coherent European strategy vis-à-vis international
partners. For example, as a long-term platform forcooperation at EU level, the SET Plan can benefit
multilateral initiatives such as ‘Mission Innovation’.

76

Thematic cooperation targeting newvalue chains and growing markets

Boosting cooperation on innovation entails putting
in place adequate framework conditions and alevel playing field, including fair and equitable
treatment of intellectual property, access to public
procurement and venture capital, common orinteroperable standards, and coherent rules for data
access and ownership.
It also involves supporting demonstration and piloting
activities and providing support for the uptake ofinnovative solutions and technologies in new markets.

Catching a ride on Brazil’s sustainable transport revolution
Some of the most innovative sustainable transport initiatives are being driven by the world’s
emerging economies. An EU-funded project is making sure that European industry can learn andprosper from these developments. “Europe-Brazil cooperation projects are often aimed at delivering
advanced technology from Europe to Brazil,” explains the VIAJEO PLUS project coordinator. “Thisinitiative is a two-way learning project. Brazil has demonstrated strong innovation and fast
adoption of new solutions on urban mobility.” A notable example is the country’s Bus Rapid Transit.
“Developing an understanding of the policy trends and technological developments happening in
Brazil”, says the project coordinator, “is vital if European industry is to compete in the Brazilian
market and maintain its global competitiveness”. The mission of the project is to benchmark
outstanding solutions for innovative and green urban mobility in Europe, Latin America, China
and Singapore, and facilitate the uptake of these solutions across different cities in these regions.

Further action should continue to develop targetedthematic cooperation on the basis of mutual benefit,
optimal scale and scope, partnership and synergy totake advantage of rising research and innovation
capacities, new value chains and growing markets
across the world.
International cooperation as across-cutting priority of Horizon 2020
The EU strategy for international cooperation in
research and innovation calls for thematic andgeographical priorities to be identified in a systematicand coherent way, and for these priorities totranslate into initiatives of the appropriate size andscope, particularly in the context of Horizon 2020.
Horizon 2020 has a strong international dimension
thanks to the integration of international cooperationin its Strategic Programming process and by
developing work programmes that take into accountthe priorities that have been identified jointly with theEU’s partner countries and regions. Work programmes
strongly encourage international participation inconsortia and an increasing number of topics offer
perfect opportunities for international collaboration
and are advertised as such or are even specificallydesigned around international cooperation.

Horizon 2020 is fully open to the participation of entities
from across the globe. Currently 13 non-EU countries(Iceland, Norway, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, theformer Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Montenegro,
Serbia, Turkey, Israel, Moldova, Switzerland (partial
association), Faroe Islands, Ukraine) are associated to
Horizon 2020, meaning that legal entities from thesecountries participate under the same conditions as
those from EU Member States, including automatic
eligibility for funding.
Association agreements with three more countries(Tunisia, Georgia, Armenia) are in the process of
being finalised at the time of writing (spring 2016).
In addition, legal entities from some 130 (mostly
developing) countries82 are automatically eligible
for funding from Horizon 2020. Entities from allother countries around the world are fully eligible
to participate in the programme if they meet theminimum conditions for participation; however,they are not automatically eligible for funding83.

82

http://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/data/ref/h2020/other/wp/20162017/annexes/h2020-wp1617-annex-a-countries-rules_en.pdf

83

Applicants from such non-EU countries may be granted funding if they meet
one of the following conditions: such funding is provided for in a bilateralscientific/technological agreement or similar arrangement between the EU
and the country where the applicant is based, the work programme/call for
proposals clearly states that applicants based in such countries are eligible
for funding or their participation is deemed essential for carrying out theaction by the Commission or the relevant funding body.

77

Figure OW.9: Countries associated to Horizon 2020

ICELAND

FAROE ISLANDSNORWAYUKRAINE
MOLDOVASWITZERLAND*BOSNIA AND
HERZEGOVINA SERBIAMONTENEGROALBANIAGEORGIAFYROM

ARMENIA
TURKEYTUNISIAISRAEL*partial association
Country associated to Horizon 2020, meaning that legal entities from these countries participate under the same
conditions as those from EU Member States, including automatic eligibility for funding
Association agreement in the process of being finalised at time of writing (end April 2016)

Further action in this area should continue
to strengthen the international dimension of
Horizon 2020, including through topics specifically
devoted to international cooperation within the
different thematic areas that mandate international
participation. Efforts should also continue to set up
co-funding mechanisms with key partner countries
and regions. Finally, communication activities
and partnering events should be organised bothas regards actions funded by Horizon 2020 andmultilateral and bilateral initiatives.

78

4. CONCLUSIONS
Openness to and engagement with the world is a
strategic priority for Europe to produce the very best
science and technology, to get research results fasterto market and create new business opportunities for
R&D-intensive industries, to solve global societal
challenges and to have a leading voice in global
debates and developments.
Targeted thematic cooperation remains crucial tocapitalise on rising excellence, new value chainsand growing markets beyond Europe, and to solve
societal challenges in the most effective way.

Further action should also enhance the role of the EU
in multilateral fora and international organisations
to push for larger investments in innovative solutions
to the global societal challenges that are at the topof the Union’s priority list.
The building of a ‘Global Research Area’ should
continue step-by-step, proceeding region-byregion based on the EU’s specific objectives foreach region. Stronger synergies with the actionsof Member States should also be sought including

through mutual learning and by involving morepartners from around the world in actions such as
Joint Programming Initiatives.
Science diplomacy should be used more broadly
as an influential instrument of the EU’s external
policies to underpin good governance and policy
making and build mutual understanding and trust.
The EU approach to diplomacy must use the elevatedlanguage of science for its remarkable uniting power.

79

IMPLEMENTING
THE THREE Os

The Commission’s Directorate-General for Researchand Innovation (DG RTD) is perhaps best known
for implementing Horizon 2020, the EUR 80 billion
Framework Programme for Research and Innovation.
This work is crucial for boosting research andinnovation across Europe. However, we have for anumber of years begun to assume an additional role,that of a policy-making department whose mission
is to improve the framework conditions for researchand innovation in Europe and for obtaining greater
impact from the investment made. We develop andimplement a range of initiatives (e.g. the creationof a European Research Area) that complement
European funding and as such do even more forresearchers, innovators and the general public.

The transition to becoming a policy DirectorateGeneral meant separating policy developmentfrom programme implementation and project
management, with the first task remaining inside
DG Research and Innovation, and the second one
increasingly entrusted to implementing bodies like
Executive Agencies.
But this is only the beginning. There is much more for
us to do, in many policy areas, because research andinnovation are not just providing answers to tackling
our biggest economic and societal challenges, they
are also the sources of evidence and advice forsound policy-making.

As a policy department, one of DG Research andInnovation’s main objectives is as well to ensure that
research and innovation is a central part of European
policy-making. DG Research and Innovation is very
active in shaping the ten priorities of Commission
President Juncker, and is making especially important
contributions to the jobs and growth agenda, theEnergy Union initiative, the Digital Single Market
package, EFSI (the Juncker Investment Package),
Europe’s place in the world and the realisation of
the Circular Economy.
None of these initiatives can be successfully rolled
out without research and innovation.
The activities of DG RTD are supporting the policy
priorities of Commissioner Moedas: Open Innovation,
Open Science and Open to the World. They aredescribed in this book and will allow research andinnovation to flourish at regional, national, European
and international level.

Robert-Jan Smits,
Director-General,
Directorate-General for Research and Innovation.

81

Carlos Moedas:
Key Speeches

KEY SPEECHESOPEN INNOVATION,
OPEN SCIENCE,
OPEN TO THE WORLDA new start for Europe: Opening up to an
ERA of Innovation Conference
Brussels, 22 June 2015
On 25 April this year, an earthquake of magnitude
7.3 hit Nepal. To get real-time geographicalinformation, the response teams used an online
mapping tool called Open Street Map. Open Street
Map has created an entire online map of the worldusing local knowledge, GPS tracks and donatedsources, all provided on a voluntary basis. It is open
license for any use.

journey 15 years ago, the European Research Area
was conceived as a physical space. We therefore
focused on the physical cooperation and mobilityof researchers in different countries, and the flow ofknowledge across national borders. If we stand backfrom the detailed policy discussions and look at thebigger picture, we will see just how much progresshas been made.

Open Street Map was created by a 24 year-old
computer science student at University College
London in 2004, has today 2 million users andhas been used for many digital humanitarian andcommercial purposes: From the earthquakes in Haiti
and Nepal to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

Cross-border research cooperation has become
a wonderful, every-day reality. Mobility is also
becoming a normal part of the career of every
researcher. Around one in three EU researchers havebeen internationally mobile over the last 10 years.
There has been an eight-fold increase in the numberof jobs advertised on the EURAXESS site since2007, with around 10 000 job offers on any givenday. Today, we have a single, integrated European
programme for research and innovation.

This story is one of many that demonstrate that weare moving into a world of open innovation and user
innovation. A world where the digital and physicalare coming together. A world where new knowledge
is created through global collaborations involving
thousands of people from across the world and fromall walks of life.
Ladies and gentlemen, over the next two days
I would like us to chart a new path for European
research and innovation policy. A new strategy thatis fit for purpose for a world that is open, digital andglobal. And I would like to set out at the start ofthis important conference my own ambitions for the
coming years.
But first, I’d like to take a moment to look backat how far we’ve come. When we started thisSo, now is the time to complete this first chapter ofthe ERA and Innovation Union. Let us take the final
steps. I am working with universities and research
institutes to launch the new RESAVER pension
scheme by this time next year. This will allow
researchers to move more easily between Member
States.
In June next year I will convene a meeting with allcountries who have introduced national ERA actionplans, to complete this first chapter.
At the same time, we must also open the next
chapter. The first chapter was about the physical ERA

85

and bringing together research and innovation. The
next chapter must focus on opening up our researchand innovation systems and bringing together thephysical and digital.
Let me then turn to the challenges ahead. As the new
Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation,
I have spent the last eight months listening, visiting
Member States, looking at the evidence, developing
my own views.
I see fantastic strengths in Europe. We are open,
we have diversity, we host great institutions. With
Horizon 2020, we are funding research on an
unprecedented scale. But we must be honest about
the challenges we face.
I see three major challenges:
1. We are too rarely succeeding in getting research
results to market. Technologies developed inEurope are most of the time commercialised
elsewhere.
2. Although Europe generates more scientificoutput than any other region in the world, insome areas we fall behind on the very best
science. At the same time, there is a revolution
happening in the way science works. Every partof the scientific method is becoming an open,
collaborative and participative process.
3. Europe punches below its weight in international
science and science diplomacy. Our collective
scientific importance should be matched by amore active voice in global debates.
So, In order to overcome these three challenges I see
three strategic priorities:
Open Innovation,
Open Science, andOpenness to the World.

So what do I mean exactly?
Let’s start with Open Innovation!
Open innovation is about involving far more actors
in the innovation process, from researchers, toentrepreneurs, to users, to governments and civilsociety. We need open innovation to capitalise on
the results of European research and innovation.
This means creating the right ecosystems, increasing
investment, and bringing more companies andregions into the knowledge economy. I would like togo further and faster towards open innovation.
First, I believe we need to do more to create aregulatory environment for innovation to flourish.
How do we make sure that legislative processes
that take several years can adapt to technologies
that evolve every month? How do we make sure that
regulation is based on an innovation principle as well
as a precautionary principle?
Second, if we compare the investment levels between
the EU and the US one of the biggest differences inthe ecosystem is venture capital. There is far lessventure capital in Europe, and venture capital funds
do not have the scale or scope to grow companies
from early stage to mid-cap and from mid-cap to
global players.
I would like to address this problem head on throughthe development of one or several European Fundof Funds that will invest in new generations of great
European innovative companies
Third, we need new actions to get more innovation
impact out of Horizon 2020. One way we can do thisis to create real synergies with the Structural Funds.
Together with Commissioner Cretu, I plan to
introduce a “Seal of Excellence” for applicantsthat are evaluated as excellent but cannot obtainfinancing from Horizon 2020, to help them access
Structural Funds. This will start with applicants to
the SME instrument.
This will allow regions to support their mostpromising companies – those companies that arerecognized as excellent at European level.

86Fourth, Horizon 2020 has made a huge step forward
in supporting innovation. I am very proud of this. But
I also see that Europe does not yet have a worldclass scheme to support the very best innovations in
the way that the European Research Council is theglobal reference for supporting excellent science.
So I would like us to take stock of the various
schemes to support innovation and SMEs under
Horizon 2020, to look at best practice internationally,
and to design a new European Innovation Council.
This is not for tomorrow, but I believe we should

discuss it as a major element under the midterm
review of Horizon 2020.
Then there’s Open Science which is the theme of
today’s discussions!
I am convinced that excellent science is thefoundation of future prosperity, and that openness
is the key to excellence. We are often told that it
takes many decades for scientific breakthroughs tofind commercial application.

“Let me tell you a story which shows the opposite. Graphene was firstisolated in the laboratory by Profs. Geim and Novoselov at the Universityof Manchester in 2003 (Nobel Prizes 2010). The development of graphene
has since benefitted from major EU support, including ERC grants for Profs.
Geim and Novoselov. So I am proud to show you one of the new graphene
products that will soon be available on the market.”This light bulb uses the unique thermal dissipation
properties of graphene to achieve greater energy
efficiencies and a longer lifetime that LED bulbs.
It was developed by a spin out company from the
University of Manchester, called Graphene Lighting,as is expected to go on sale by the end of the year.

This will mean setting standards for the management,interoperability and quality of scientific data. I would
like to see progress on this in next 12 months. And I
will want to see what further support or requirementsfor open data should be introduced in Horizon 2020
following the midterm review.

But we must not be complacent. If we look at
indicators of the most excellent science, we findthat Europe is not top of the rankings in certain
areas. Our ultimate goal should always be topromote excellence not only through ERC and Marie
Skłodowska-Curie but throughout the entire H2020.

Second, I strongly believe that the time has comefor a European initiative on research integrity. This
will be a subject of one of the sessions tomorrow
and I would like to see the discussion including policy
makers, research funders, research institutions andresearchers themselves.

For such an objective we have to move forward on
two fronts:

Indeed I think we should launch a new European
Research Integrity Initiative – with clear standards
and mechanisms to tackle scientific misconduct – by
the end of this year.

First, we are preparing a call for European Science
Cloud Project in order to identify the possibilityof creating a cloud for our scientists. We needmore open access to research results and theunderlying data. Open access publication is alreadya requirement under Horizon 2020, but we now needto look seriously at open data.

This will not only boost scientific excellence, but
it will show to the public that European science isabove reproach.
Finally we need to be Open to the World!

87

Europe is a global leader in science, and this should
translate into a leading voice in global debates.
To remain relevant and competitive, we need toengage more in science diplomacy and global
scientific collaboration. It is not sufficient to only
support collaborative projects; we need to enable
partnerships between regions and countries.
Challenges in areas like energy, health, food and water
are global challenges. And Europe should be leading
the way in developing global research partnerships toaddress these challenges. This means speaking with
one voice, and close coordination with Member States’international collaborations. The example of the EDCTP
initiative shows that we can do it.
But I would like to go much further and begin building
a global research area. This will not happen in one
step, but through developing partnerships with otherareas, such as China, Latin America and the UnitedStates. As a first step, we announced two weeks
ago the creation of a Common Research Area at the
Academic Summit of Heads of State and Governmentof the European Union and the Community of Latin
America and Caribbean States. I would like to takea similar step next Monday, when I co-chair the EU
China Innovation Cooperation Dialogue.
So, during my mandate I commit myself to launchand expand a series of international initiatives.
Let me give some examples:
I will work with Latin America and African partners
to launch a common research strategy for the South
Atlantic, mirroring what has been done for the North
Atlantic under the Galway initiative.
I am working with Member State and partner
governments to launch the PRIMA initiative as a
joint research programme on water and food for theMediterranean region.
We should invest more in projects like the SESAME
initiative in Jordan that enables researchers from88

across this region to work together on world classscience.
This conference is our opportunity to complete thecurrent ERA and Innovation Union actions and tomove forward confidently towards open innovation,
open science and open to the world. This new
InnovationERA must be based on actions and notwords. I have mentioned a few examples today, butthere are no doubt other possibilities and better ideas.
We should not be afraid of testing new ideas
and piloting new actions [Drew Faust the Dean ofHarvard always tells students: “A key part of any
success is the part of you that is willing to fail”].
But we then must have the discipline to stop thosewhich are not working, and the ambition to scale
up what works. Research and innovation must takea long term perspective and not be trapped by thepast. And we must make sure that each one of ouractions brings in new entrants, young researchers,
dynamic entrepreneurs, and people who have neverbeen involved in European research and innovation.
This isn’t just another Commission conference.
This is your chance to feed your ideas and aspirations
into this new strategy. We will find out soon enoughwhat works and what doesn’t and we will build on
our successes together.
When innovators like LEGO start fusing real bricks
with digital magic, when citizens conduct their own
R&D through online community projects, when
doctors start printing live tissues for patients …
Policymakers must follow suit.
We owe it to the European Citizens.
We owe it to the future generations.
Let’s dare to make Europe open to innovation, open
to science and open to the world.

SCIENCE WITHOUT BORDERS
Royal Society lecture,
London, 23 March 2015
Professor Poliakoff,
Ladies and gentlemen,Distinguished guests,
Needless to say, it is a great honour to speak here
today. The Royal Society of London is a chronicle oflegacies. The legacies of men like Sir Isaac Newton
and Charles Darwin. And new chapters created by
women like Dame Athene Donald and Ulrike Tillmann.

industries, rising from the convergence of several
disciplines at once:•• Health with information technology.
•• Marine ecology with molecular science.

I don’t wish to try to convince you of anything
today. I’m preaching to the converted. I simply
wish to share my views as a politician, who
believes in science and innovation as the true
drivers of growth and prosperity, and as uniquetools for diplomacy.
The United Kingdom has made countless
contributions to the progress of European scienceand research. We come together 350 years after
the first issue of Philosophical Transactions of
the Royal Society. The oldest surviving scientificjournal. The journal that pioneered peer review.
The journal that created an international model forsharing scientific knowledge.
We share a remarkable scientific history and almost
limitless potential. The European Union is foundedon the principle of openness: to people, commerce,
investment and ideas. And, it will be our openness
that ensures our global standing in research, scienceand innovation in the years to come.
That is certain, because today the way we review,
access and communicate scientific information ischanging fundamentally. Science without borders
isn’t just about national borders.
The model set by the Philosophical Transactions of
the Royal Society is being transformed in the digitalage. The way we think about and measure excellenceis evolving. Evolving at a time when the physicaland digital worlds are merging. New and exciting•• Robotics in driverless transport.
This is an opportunity to innovate in a very European
way: Through diversity of people and talent. Bringing
our commercial aspirations into line with the needsof citizens and the limited resources of our planet.
The PharmaSea project is a perfect example. With
EU research funding, it brings together 24 partners
from 13 countries to study marine microbes, andbioactive compounds. Research that could leadto new medications, antibiotics and nutritional
treatments. PharmaSea unites researchers in
the fields of marine genomics, biosynthesis andchemical structure analysis. Teaming up withthe world’s largest free chemical database andtop chemical software company − a multitude of
disciplines and technologies in action.
The sheer amount of data at our fingertips, thesheer amount of opportunities for collaboration, isoverwhelming. The next big challenge is how to bringeverything into the same timeline.
I want to make Europe home to each and every new
approach. The European Union provides the perfecttesting ground for new methods and ideas. We havemade sure it is!
We have invested a great deal in each other, because
we know these contributions work.

89

Let me tell you a story.
About ten years ago, Lord Sainsbury, the UK
Science Minister was on a plane. He was going to
the Competitiveness Council meeting of researchministers. In his briefing was the official UK position to
oppose the creation of a European Research Council.
The briefing said there would be no added value inindividual, EU-funded grants for basic research. This
could be done better by individual member statessurely? Fortunately, Lord Sainsbury took a risk. He
had listened to scientists, who strongly believed in a
European Research Council.
So, when he stood up to present the UK position, hechanged it. A man of courage.
Since those days, the ERC has supported close to5000 grants.
Financing the people whose discoveries can start
new industries, create new markets, and improve
our quality of life.
People like Norwegian husband-and-wife team
Professor May-Britt and Edvard Moser, who
discovered Nobel Prize winning proof of the humanbrain’s inner navigation system.
Many of those grants have gone to researchers at
British universities, making a huge contribution toscientific excellence in the UK.
The ERC’s work is made possible by Horizon 2020.
The EU programme for research and innovation
funding. The biggest multinational research
programme in the world.
Today, science cannot advance in only one discipline,
one country or one university. Science must be freed
from borders of any kind. A few days ago, I wasin Kiev to sign Ukraine’s Association Agreement
to Horizon 2020. The first time Ukraine has been
associated to an EU programme. I told Ukranian
Scientists that we need them, as much as they need
us. We cannot walk alone in a world where speed
and collaboration are essential.

Horizon 2020 represents thousands of projects,
organisations, companies, experts and scientists
united by curiosity. Billions of euros dedicated to
improving the world we live in. The world we share.
The world we will pass on to future generations. It isa radically new and comprehensive approach to theEuropean Union’s research funding policy.
Horizon 2020 has brought focus and openness to
European science. This is an amazing achievement!
And − in just the last five years − Europe has witnessed
many great achievements for science without borders.
Discoveries made by taking risks together!
Let me take you back to 1993. When the UnitedStates’ plans for a Super Collider were halted by
Congress. 20 kilometres of tunnel in Texas had been
dug. Over 2 billion dollars had already been spent.
Public opinion was generally favourable. But amida national recession and mounting costs, politicalsupport had faded.
Had it reached completion, the Super Collider would
have dwarfed Europe’s Large Hadron Collider
at CERN. The greatest discovery in physics for ageneration. Evidence of the Higgs particle. Might
have occurred on American soil, rather than among
the suburbs of Geneva.
I can understand the political pressure that brought
an end to America’s Super Collider. It isn’t easy tojustify spending money on elusive particles, while
citizens face economic hardship. It’s risky to invest
millions into something you cannot guarantee
will work. Investment in science is a long-term
commitment. It might pay off in 1 year, or 100 years.
It doesn’t win elections, but it is the best investment
we can make in our prosperity and progress.
When it achieved first beam, more than 10,000
people from 100 countries had worked to build
Europe’s Large Hadron Collider. Scientists from Iranand Israel, from India and Pakistan, began to study
particles at a resolution 1000 times smaller thanthe proton: united in asking fundamental questions
about the laws of nature. Science without borders at
a European centre of excellence.
It was at CERN that the World Wide Web wasinvented. Invented, so that physicists around the90world could share data. An innovation, that would
swiftly change communication, commerce andeducation for over 3 billion people worldwide - with
implications for intellectual property, copyright andcomputing. And it is the Web that is now changing
science itself: allowing scientists to collaborate inunprecedented ways. Enabling non-scientists to join
in experiments and make new discoveries. Providing
wider access to journals. Supporting vast quantities
of data to be shared openly.
The world’s biggest experiment has had many
wonderful and unforeseen results! This month, after
two years of planned maintenance and upgrades, theCollider is primed again. Ready to smash particles attwice the energy it did when the Higgs Boson was
discovered. And we can only imagine what will beachieved by this multinational cooperation next.
Such bold, frontier research is central to advancing
excellence and innovation in an increasingly
globalised world. But, how and whether we choose toinvest in science and innovation is crucial too. In thenegotiations on the European Union’s 7-year budget,a tough decision was taken.
In the face of economic crises − and with a reduction,
in real terms, in the overall European budget −research funding was actually increased. In this new
mandate, the European Commission wants to makemore high risk, high value investments in researchand innovation, not less.
We want to make sure Europe has the best
conditions to benefit from excellence, innovationand openness in science.
If we want to remedy the fact that we still haven’t
achieved investing 3% of GDP into research anddevelopment, we have to try something new…
The scientific community fought hard for Horizon
2020 to have the unparalleled budget it has
today. Because it makes sense. Because it createsknowledge and prosperity. I want to bring even moreto the table. Does that mean sowing the seeds ofinnovation through grants and project proposals?
Yes! But that also means putting money into highrisk, high value investments.

The new European Fund for Strategic Investments
will do exactly that: financing projects with highrisk, high value profiles: in strategic infrastructure,
education, research, innovation and more. 315 billion
euros of public and private funding to be leveraged
over the next 3 years.
That means more money for European research andinnovation, not less. I know that some people are
sceptical of fundamental science attracting private
investment, or even loans. But let us consider how
the Large Hadron Collider was financed. The Collider
that has thrown up so much more than expected. The
European Investment Bank lent 300 million euros to
CERN in the final phase of the Collider’s completion.
300 million euros in loans towards the constructionof an unprecedented experiment. An experiment noone could be certain would work the way they hoped.
So, a high risk, high value investment from theEuropean Investment Bank was needed to get
Europe’s Large Hadron Collider off the ground.
Now it’s making discoveries and raising up
tomorrow’s international human capital in a broad
range of applied sciences and engineering.
So, I have touched on science without bordersin Europe; science that transcends sectors anddisciplines; and innovation generated throughinvestment. I’d now like to look beyond Europe, tointernational research cooperation. What I believe
to be Europe’s most outstanding contribution to theworld: where we have a common challenge, wherescientists want to collaborate and where there isa political opportunity, our innate fascination forrevealing the secrets of the universe is a powerful,
uniting force for mankind.
The journey is as important, if not more important,
than the results we achieve. My Harvard Professor,
Linda Hill, says we must “embrace creative abrasion”.
We must amplify, rather than minimise ourdifferences to spark innovation.
That’s why I believe in Europe. Our diversity and ourdifferences are the key ingredient for innovation andmost powerful when solving the greatest challenges
faced by humanity.

91

In recent months, EU research efforts have been on thefront line in the fight against Ebola. The scale of humantragedy caused by the outbreak required nothing lessthan immediate action: an unprecedented effort tomobilise over 200 million euros of European researchfunding in a matter of months. Projects to develop
vaccines and rapid diagnostics tests were successfullylaunched. A momentous example of European
leadership in international public health research.
And, there have been encouraging preliminary
results. Results indicating the antiviral drug (favipira-vir), may be an effective treatment for early
Ebola disease. The effectiveness of two candidate
vaccines is currently being evaluated throughclinical trials in the outbreak zone.
It hasn’t been easy, but Europe is succeeding insetting new precedents for international cooperationin research. Europe is bringing nations, scientists andcitizens together to solve global challenges.
Ladies and gentlemen,
I wish there was time to cover more. I look forward
to our discussion in a moment. And I welcome yourquestions on these and other topics! Allow me to end
by saying that Europe cherishes the United Kingdom
as part of its community of scientific endeavour.
And, I hope that you cherish EU membership for its
contribution to science.
Your membership is essential to the global standingof British universities and to their contribution to
the British economy! The EU funds British research.
It promotes the mobility of British researchers. It
creates jobs and opportunities for British scientists.
It provides the conditions for British discoveries. And
we are always improving EU support to research,science and innovation!

British science thrives in the EU and we thrive
because of you. The majority of the UK’s top 20
research partners are other EU countries. You
ranked first for number of applicants to our previous
framework programme. In the last two years of that
programme, you received more funding than any
other country, including Germany. That’s almost 7
billion euros of EU funds flowing to the UK in the formof over 17,000 grants. Earned by your willingness,
and ability, to compete for funding based on merit.
So, my ambitions for your place in Europe areimmense. And, in my view, your success rests on youropenness. On your engagement and contribution
to European efforts for progress. On the value ofscience without borders. The real risk is to draw newborders. I always want to see the United Kingdom at
our table. It is because of your participation, that thevalues of excellence, openness and innovation havebeen reinforced in Horizon 2020.
Excellence isn’t guaranteed by your past, it’s made byinvesting in your future. By investing in our collective
future. By removing all borders from science.
As President Shimon Perez once said:“The value of country is not andwill never be measured by square
metres of land, but by the numberof scientists per square metre.”
Ladies and gentlemen thank you for your attention. I
look forward to learning from you this evening, and I
will do my best to answer your questions. I’m a great
fan of everything you’ve achieved and I will always
champion British science in Europe and the world!
Find the Speech online
http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_
SPEECH-15-4658_en.htm

92THE DEMOCRATISATION OF
INNOVATION
X Symposium Cotec Europa
Rome, 28 October 2015
Your Excellency President Mattarella,Your Majesty [King Felipe VI of Spain],Your Excellency President Cavaco Silva,
Ladies and gentlemen, It is my distinct pleasure
to be among such distinguished company. It’s notoften that leaders of your calibre demonstrate sucha genuine interest in how their nations’ innovations
will shape the future of Europe and the world.
President Mattarella has long been a moral compass
to his nation as a constitutional Court Justice. At his
inauguration, the President presented a strong casefor institutional reform and a commitment to teardown the barriers to Italy’s economic growth.
Your Majesty has had innovation at the core of Your
Majesty’s vision for Europe, actively urging Spanish
companies to invest in knowledge, to create value
through innovation and to compete globally in asustainable manner.
President Cavaco Silva’s distinguished record of
public service to my own country includes placing“competitiveness” firmly at the centre of politicaldebate. Well before it was widely understood,
President Cavaco Silva rightly saw competitivenessas an issue of value, not of cost, that only throughinnovation could our companies compete globallyand sustainably.
Ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests, over the
past week, I’ve been in Lisbon and Madrid sharing
my ideas on how the digital transition is changing
the way we do innovation and science. Today, I’m
in Rome − completing the Cotec Europa triangle −and I’d like to talk about what I see as the disruptive
implications of a truly digital economy and why weshould embrace it.
I’m sure you will agree that digital technologies
have already changed how we conduct research,

how we do science and how we innovate, how we
produce and sell products and services. Yet, I would
argue that we are still at the infancy of the digital
revolution.
A web pioneer, Steve Case, says that we are just at
the beginning of the third stage of the internet. In
the first, the infrastructure of the internet was built.
In the second, where we still are, apps were built on
top of that infrastructure. The third, just emerging,is when we bring the internet and the digital tothe more traditional “infrastructures”, like health,transport or manufacturing.
After falling behind in the first two stages of theinternet, Europe now has a fresh opportunity to gain
an edge and push our economy to a higher stageof innovation and growth. To achieve this edge,
we should understand the three ways in which thedigital technology creates an impact on innovation.
First, it puts the user in the driving seat. Second, it
empowers small players, allowing them to enter anddominate established markets and third, it enables
the creation of totally new markets. Let me illustrateeach of these three drivers of innovation and thenconclude by saying what I intend to do, from theEuropean Commission, to maximise Europe’s
capacity to reap this opportunity of the digital.
So the first point is about placing the “user” at
the centre of innovation. The digital revolutionmeans that innovation and science are no longer
the monopoly of the producer or the lab. The user
has a say! The internet empowers users to codevelop products, to experiment, to give feedback
to producers and it enables wise producers tosystematically learn from their users.

93

Let me tell you the story of Tal Golesworthy a boiler
engineer from the UK. Tal was diagnosed with
Marfan Syndrome. That meant that his aorta would
not last. When he was diagnosed and the doctor
said that at some point the vessel could burst, heas an engineer found a solution that has saved hislife and so far the lives of more than 100 others. So
in the digital world, user innovations can have great
impact. Imagine what this will bring in the coming
years, as more and more people feel empowered toinnovate. This is truly a force for the democratisationof innovation.
Similarly, the digital economy opens the possibility
for smaller or newer players to enter an existing
market and gain rapid dominance. Think of theSwedish company Spotify, which from scratch, ina few years, was able to enter the music industry
and completely dominate it. Or think of Tesla, theAmerican electric car manufacturer, which entered amature and well established industry and has been
growing extremely fast.
There are two factors that explain why Tesla is avery real challenge to the traditional auto industry.
First, they were the first to understand the importanceof integrating software – the digital – with themechanical part of the vehicle. Did you know, forexample, that two weeks ago Tesla updated thesoftware of existing cars? So imagine this, in their
garages, through Wi-Fi, existing Tesla owners wereable to update the software and suddenly their cars
gained basic self-driving capabilities!
The second reason why Tesla is a challenge, isthe fact that electric engines, combined with
rapidly evolving software, are less complex than
traditional combustion engines. Thus, the traditional
engineering edge from old players is no longer soimportant. A software whiz-kid may not even have adriving license, but he has the opportunity to bring a
concrete innovation to a car. So, with the integrationof the digital and the physical, new players can enter
existing markets and gain dominance.
The example I gave you involves an Americancompany, but nothing excludes Europeans from thisgame. Because of our strong industrial base, if we areable to advance in the digitisation of industry, we can94innovate much more and we can gain a competitive
global edge and new European players, including
SMEs can have the ambition to compete against
more established players, yet again, showing digital
innovation as a source of economic democratisation.
This brings me to the third way in which the digital
impacts innovation. Apart from putting the user
at the centre, and enabling new players to enter
traditional markets, the digital economy has thecapacity to create entirely new markets. This iswhat Clayton Christensen calls “market creating
innovations”. Think of Uber or AirBnB. These areplatforms that link free capacity or spare capacitythat already exists in society – extra houses or extra
cars – with users that need them.
They are able to do this by being at the cuttingedge of the internet, apps, geolocation and mobile
technology. They are successful, because theyeliminate “pain points” in the interaction – forexample, you do not have to have cash with you to
use an Uber, and they are also successful because
they just work – the design, the service, the process,is easy for the user.
No doubt these new services pose concrete
challenges to our regulatory and tax systems. They
raise questions of fairness and competition andthese cannot be ignored, but my point is that thesebusinesses enable economic transactions that would
otherwise simply not happen. This is what I mean
when I say that the digital creates new markets
and enables a type of innovation that creates new
economic opportunities.
Again, this is a force for the democratisation of
innovation: empowering the sharing economy,
promoting employment and even a more sustainable
use of existing resources, which can be positive forthe environment.
So, I have presented what are, in my view, thethree ways in which digital impacts innovation:
digital empowers the user to innovate; digital gives
opportunities to newer smaller, more innovative
players, to challenge existing markets and digital
enables the ultimate innovation, which is thecreation of whole new markets with new jobs andnew economic opportunities.

A common denominator is the democratisation of
innovation. All of us, as consumers, but also a small
enterprise, or a part-time driver, or an aspiring
musician, or a young scientist at a remote institution- all of us can be innovators and bring positive
impact to the world.
How can Europe embrace this opportunity?
The answer is of course complex, but it starts fromthe bottom-up. It starts with associations such as
Cotec that place these issues at the centre of thedebate. It continues with projects such as Start-up
Lisboa and Beta-i that are bringing forth a newgeneration of business leaders in Portugal; or withassociations like Mind the Bridge networking Italianstart-ups with Silicon Valley and it also continues
with projects like the Spanish IN3 or South Summit
promoting Spanish entrepreneurship, and to whichYour Majesty has given so much attention.
Ladies and gentlemen, these examples, I think serve
to demonstrate that Italy, Portugal and Spain havethe know-how and creative energy to reap the fullpotential of the digital economy. Some of Europe’s
best digital success stories are coming from theyoung businesses in your countries.
On my part, I have the privilege of managing Horizon
2020, the largest programme for research, scienceand innovation in Europe. Every day we fund thebest of the best - the top scientists and researchers

and the most innovative businesses and I have theambition of creating a European Innovation Council,
which can replicate for entrepreneurs what theEuropean Research Council has brought to European
scientists.
Because I believe innovators should have thefreedom to tell us what they want to do and not theother way around.
Because I believe real innovation comes frombottom-up collaboration and intersection between
different disciplines.
This will not be a project for tomorrow. It willtake time, and I count on institutions like Cotec tocontribute with ideas on how this Council shouldwork. Europe has to be the continent of Open
Innovation, Open Science and Open the world.
Your Excellency President Mattarella, Your Majesty,Your Excellency President Cavaco Silva, thank you foryour leadership and thank you to Cotec, for placing
innovation at the heart of policy debates in Italy,
Spain and Portugal.
Walter Isaacson once said about the effect of digitalon innovation, “This innovation will come frompeople who are able to link beauty to engineering,humanity to technology, and poetry to processors […]In other words, creators who can flourish where thearts intersect with sciences.”95

EUROPEAN RESEARCH AND
INNOVATION FOR GLOBAL
CHALLENGES
Lund Revisited: Next Steps in TacklingSocietal Challenges
Lund, 4 December 2015
Minister Hellmark Knutsson,
Professor Jasanoff,
Esteemed guests,
Ladies and gentlemen,“Science is far from a perfect
instrument of knowledge. It’s justthe best we have. In this respect it’s
like democracy.”
Those are the profound words of Carl Sagan, a man
who was a brilliant communicator of science. His
words remind us that science − like democracy – willchange, develop and transform, but the direction it
takes will always rest in our hands: shaped by ourdesire to contribute a better world. One in which we
can all prosper.
Last year the new Commission had to decide thedirection we will take, as policymakers for scienceand innovation, so that European research,science and innovation can contribute to solving
the global challenges of our time, while, equally,
ensuring the continued progress and prosperity ofEuropean society.
Two things were clear. First, our actions must always
reflect the European values of openness and diversity,
if we are serious about using European researchand innovation for something greater than our own
gain. And second, we have to embrace change − try
new things and be willing to take risks − if we want
European research and innovation to remain at theforefront of modernity and economic growth.
It is therefore with great pride, that I look back on theyear gone by and consider how this new Commission

96

has worked with speed and conviction in its firstefforts to support European research and innovationthat benefits Europe and the rest of the world.
In just one year, we have shown that the European
Union is capable of finding new ways to mobilise
investment in high-risk, high-reward innovation
projects, with 1 billion euro through the newEuropean Fund for Strategic Investments.
In just six months, we were able to establish a new
Scientific Advice Mechanism, so that a diverse group ofleading European experts can be called upon to inform
EU policymaking with independent scientific advice.
And, in a few short months, we demonstrated that
the Commission is capable of reacting swiftly in acrisis: intensifying the vital research needed to tackle
a global health challenge like Ebola.
Today, I am honoured to mark the renewal of the
Lund declaration, a declaration which calls for
European research to be freed from its traditional
constraints, so that it may have the greatest possible
positive impact for society.
It is time to embrace the change that comes witha much more ambitious vision for the future, but ifthat vision is for Europe to benefit from using its
research and innovation to solve global challenges,
we must first consider that many of our most familiar
academic structures and scientific institutions were
established long before science was ever a global
endeavour.

In past, individual nations conquered Everest,
achieved space flight, navigated to the poles andexplored the depths of our oceans. Science wasdefined by one nation’s sprint to the finish line after
the other, and scientific institutions and their funding
were organised accordingly. Science was a matter ofnational pride and national security.
There was no political need to share data and little
economic incentive to do so, but, by the turn of the
century, those trends had already given way to avery different − a very global − dynamic.
New, pioneering nations were investing in science andeducation. Science was no longer dominated by thesame elite club of countries and the challenges were
becoming more complex. Whether it was chasing the
Higgs particle, finding new drug therapies for HIV/
AIDS; or maintaining the international space station,
one by one, the latest frontiers in science proved to
be insurmountable without collective effort.
It was no longer financially or intellectually viable toreach new frontiers alone.
So we focused on physical cooperation: helping
researchers to spend time working in different
countries in the European Research Area. Now wetake cross-border research cooperation for granted.
Europe succeeded in overcoming the physicalbarriers. Where we still have work to do, is adapting
to a world in which how we use and contribute toknowledge is changing.
This is why I have made open innovation, open
science and being open to the world, the 3 defining
priorities of my mandate, so that European researchis best equipped to take on the global challenges ofthe 21st century.
Open innovation is my first priority, because welive in a time when those without access to the
traditional establishment are often the ones doing
the most exciting work.
I believe more open innovation in Europe would
provide space for all kinds of people to pursue theirideas. People who see the solutions others do not
and it is time we let them in.

So, over the next six months, I will be exploring how
a European Innovation Council could help innovators
succeed in bringing European innovation to global
markets and we are innovating finance for innovation
through the new European Fund for Strategic
investments; cooperation with the structural funds
through the Seal of Excellence and proposing a Fundof Funds as part of the Capital Markets Union, toleverage more European venture capital.
Open science is my second priority, because thedays of keeping our research results to ourselves areover. There is far more to gain from sharing data andletting others access and analyse that data.
For example, if sharing big data reveals that a certain
kind of cancer activates a particular molecularpathway in most cases and it turns out that there isalready a drug approved and available to block theactivation of that molecular pathway, clinical trials
can begin almost immediately. Saving time, money
and lives.
Or if scientists want to monitor the effects ofclimate change on local ecosystems, they can use
open science to engage citizen reporting, and rapidly
multiply the data at their disposal.
To make the most of open science opportunities for
Europe, I plan to focus on open data, open access andresearch integrity over the course of my mandate.
Currently the Commission is working with EU
member states to launch a European Open Science
Agenda. We’re considering the merits of developing a
European Open Science Cloud, as well as a ResearchIntegrity Initiative and I will continue to advocate theremoval of legal barriers to the use of Text and Data
Mining techniques for research and innovation.
Open to the world, is my third priority, because there
are few forces in this world as engaging and unifying
as scientific endeavour. This year the EU was granted
observer status for SESAME, home to the first particle
accelerator, and to science diplomacy, in the Middle
East, and we took the historical step of Horizon 2020
Association Agreements with Ukraine and Tunisia.

97

It is under this priority that I believe the spirit of
the Lund declaration can have a very significant
impact. I too see the potential for Joint Programming
Initiatives “to become internationally recognised as
best practices, [by] involving more partners” fromaround the world.
So I call on Member States to renew their support
and to align their national research and innovation
activities with that of the Joint Programming

Initiatives. Particularly in the areas of health, climate,food, water and urbanisation.
Generate new momentum, by giving Joint
Programming the political commitment; theopportunities for citizen engagement; and theinvestments they need to lead the way into a global
research area.
Ladies and gentlemen, Carl Sagan also said:“The scientific way of thinking is atonce imaginative and disciplined. This is central to its success. Science invites us to
let the facts in, even when they don’t conform to our preconceptions […]This kind of thinking is also an essential tool for a democracy in an age of change.”

So I ask you to consider not only what we mustachieve and overcome in linear terms. I ask you to
consider what European research should stand for,in an age of global change and global responsibility.
As I see it, Europe must lead by example. Global
knowledge, to solve global challenges, is a web we98

weave together. With each new strand it becomesstronger, but there is no way of knowing on whose
strand the next dewdrop of inspiration will form,
or where the next big idea will land. The only thingthat is certain is that we can cast a much wider
net together.

References andAcknowledgements

REFERENCES ANDACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The section ‘Recent milestones in the debate on open science’ in the Open Science chapter is adapted fromwww.scienceintransition.nl. References to the articles in question are listed below:
References to articles listed in Box 2:
San Francisco Declaration on Research
Assessment

http://www.ascb.org/dora/

How Science Goes Wrong

http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21588057-scientiststhink-science-self-correcting-alarming-degree-it-not-trouble

Calls for a boycott

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/09/nobelwinner-boycott-science-journals

Reproducibility Initiative

http://validation.scienceexchange.com/

The Lancet

http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS01406736(13)62678-1/fulltext

US National Institutes of Health

http://www.nature.com/polopoly_fs/1.14586!/menu/main/
topColumns/topLeftColumn/pdf/505612a.pdf

says Nobel Prize winner Sydney Brenner

http://kingsreview.co.uk/magazine/blog/2014/02/24/how-academiaand-publishing-are-destroying-scientific-innovation-a-conversationwith-sydney-brenner/

Bruce Alberts and Harold Varmus in PNAS

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/04/09/1404402111.full.pdf

Universities should foster implementation http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1314777
sciencePublic consultation ‘Science 2.0’:
Science in Transition

http://ec.europa.eu/research/consultations/science-2.0/
consultation_en.htm

Meaningless quantification, a crisis in peer http://www.nature.com/nrm/journal/v15/n6/full/nrm3807.html
review, reproducibility problems and therise of fellowships
PLoS Medicine

http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.
pmed.1001747“Says PNAS Editor-in-Chief Inder Verma”

http://www.pnas.org/content/112/26/7875.full

The Metric Tide

http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/rereports/Year/2015/metrictide/
Title,104463,en.html

PNAS

http://www.pnas.org/content/112/36/11335

101

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
With thanks to the staff of the Directorate-General for Research and Innovation who have contributed to thisbook, including:
Kevin Walsh (Editor), Michael Arentoft, Benat Bilbao, Jean-Claude Burgelman, Maria da Graça Carvalho,
Carolina Gario, Konstantinos Glinos, Kirsi Haavisto, Silvia Luber, Michèle Magermans, Tuomas Nousiainen,
Irina Reyes, Keith Sequeira, Marnix Surgeon, Sandra Vanbellinghen, René von Schomberg

Cover: © Delphotostock, #26616778; © kaer_fstoc, #99658152, 2016. Source: Fotolia.com.
Images: pg 11: © fotogestoeber, #102884177, 2016; pg 14: © XtravaganT, #81175599, 2016; pg 24: © gstockstudio, #86115979, 2016;
pg 33: © PointImages, #92798227, 2016; pg 46: © polygraphus, #71721451, 2016; pg 54: © morganimation, #83642646, 2016; pg 65:© adrenalinapura, #82285826, 2016; pg 71, 72, 73: © dikobrazik, #85680303, 2015; pg 78: © dikobrazik, #85680303, 2015. Source:
Fotolia.com.

102

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KI-04-16-263-EN-N

This book brings together some of the key conceptual
insights behind Open Innovation, Open Science andOpen to the World and highlights actions that are alreadytaking place or are being prepared. I hope that the ideas
and initiatives described in this book will stimulate
anyone interested in European research and innovation.
I would like it to encourage debate and lead to new
ideas on what the European Union should do, should
not do, or do differently.
Carlos Moedas
European Commissioner for Research,
Science and Innovation

Research and Innovation policy

ISBN 978-92-79-57346-0
doi:10.2777/061652