Commencing Collaborations: the Country Side

Let’s say you have defined all questions, issues and problems while focusing on results (see our page “The Art of Successful International Research Collaboration: Some basic ideas”). The next step on your collaboration agenda would be to establish and shape the relationships you need to achieve these results. In a perfect world whether your are going international or a foreign investigator contacts you, you have your roadmap for collaboration in a drawer (see our page “Already have collaboration?”).

At this stage you have certainly identified potential partners in Europe or elsewhere (eg. through EU’s Framework Programme project participants on CORDIS or Europa, through scientific journals, previous conferences, past experience, etc.) and even had some common activities like writing articles together.

The 25 EU countries have spent, in 2003, €186 billion on R&D (Eurostat news release 26/2005 — 24 February 2005), while the Commission spent €17.6 billion for the 2002–2006 6th Framework Programme. If the R&D activity of some European organizations is supported up to 25% by the EU, on average the budget of the current Framework Programme covers just above 2% of the total R&D expenditure in the European area. For international co-operation with Europe, each member state should attract a far from negligible share of attention, translating in potential resources. Then you may look for the main sources of support for addressing collaboration with a European country through the following steps:

  • Having a basic knowledge of the national system you are stepping into and national research priorities, if they exist, won’t hurt.
  • Some universities and research organisations have MoUs (Memorandum of Understanding) with counterparts in foreign countries. Whilst they usually gather dust on a shelf on the 3rd underground sub-level of the archives, some provide flagged funding for co-operation, typically travel money. Even more, in some countries without MoU nothing can be done. An MoU would be signed at the university level (check with the research office), sometimes at the school level (check with the head office or the business manager), at the corporate level for CSIRO or other Commonwealth organizations (international office).
  • Bilateral agreements between Australia and European countries usually follow the same deed of MoUs. In other cases they are the cornerstone of active collaborations, translated into actions like joint grants, seed money, or objective driven support.
  • Most of the EU countries have an Embassy/High Commission in Canberra. Only Italy, France and the UK, along with the European Commission, have a dedicated science and technology adviser. They should be the first step toward working with the country they represent because they have contacts, know the country and can leverage funding.

The typical actions you can start with a country are:

  • Exchange PhD students becomes a very common exercise. Domestic and usual route for funding should be sufficient for a once-off. For sustained collaboration, double badged PhD or “cotutelle” can be sought. Different types of support for travel is available through country specific schemes.
  • Long stays of experienced researchers should be sought at this stage of the collaboration. Once again, national schemes should be the best conveyor, with Australian schemes to visit Europe. Special agreements exist between Australian organisations and their European equivalent (eg. NHMRC/Inserm). Most of the European countries have special schemes for visiting fellows or post docs. European level (from the European Commission) schemes like the Marie Curie individual fellowships can be very helpful.
  • For larger and multi-annual research projects domestic schemes should provide the bulk of the needed money (eg. Discovery Grants…) in each country. Special cooperation support can top up extra cost of collaboration or specific sub projects (eg. ISL in Australia).

There are some principles in international R&D co-operation from governments: they don’t like supporting projects or individuals that don’t fit in their national agenda. Therefore, it is much easier for a European researchers to have support to go to Australia, or invite an Australian colleague to participate in their project, than for an Australian researcher to be sponsored by that country to visit the European teams and vice-versa. It may sounds identical to the end user, but for the fund provider it is night and day. That requires a minimum level of commitment from the other party, then planning: imagine you want support for a six months visit at the University of Bielefeld in Germany. The first step would be to ask for funding from your laboratory, your school, your university, the AAS/ARC/DEST. But the German team really wants you and you apply to a German grant (eg. BMBF, DAAD). Depending on the application you may have to submit it personally or through the German team. Whatever the process is, at one point you will certainly have to provide the equivalent of a referee letter. Don’t be satisfied with a note from your very junior German colleague, suggest that they include a letter from the head of the laboratory, or the dean of the faculty. That will show that your project is backed by major policies, in other words worth supporting. That will also tell you if this researcher is as well acquainted and supported as you were told…

In brief define the activities you need to undertake, structure the collaboration for resilience. Let’s be trivial once more: it’s not about getting some research money from Belgium or Germany for research that nobody wants to support in Australia. But instead, it is about exchanging expertise or accessing facilities and be on the radar as a global player for potential call for proposals, calls for tender and contracts.

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