While Australia’s commitment to a 20-year plan for Antarctica has been welcomed by some it has also raised concerns over the nation’s ability to fulfil a credible research role in the south polar region…
The Australian government’s blueprint for the Antarctic is due out soon. Given the recent cuts in public funding for science, what hope is there for any extra monies for the polar region. And what should…
New funding expected to encourage world class excellence in research is not enough for the work involved in measuring the research, says Australian Nobel prizewinner Professor Brian Schmidt. In a perspective…
Teresa Marques, Centro de Filosofia da Universidade de Lisboa
Every five years, the Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation (FCT) reviews its research institutes from Astronomy to Zoology. But this year, for the first time, the FCT contracted the European Science…
Taxpayers want to know that their money is well spent on research. Yet funding agencies persist in trying to explain research results in terms of papers and publications rather than in terms of people…
Australia allocates around A$9 billion a year of taxpayers’ money for research, but how do we know if that money is being spent wisely? With the Australian Government threatening to reduce the amount of…
After a few years of increased funding, Australian research has recently started to face cutbacks and job losses. This boom and bust cycle for science is nothing new but is it time to take a new approach…
Today I awoke to the news that Germany has announced its intention to withdraw from the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project. The SKA is an ambitious project that plans to build a radio telescope with…
Research labs in universities receive substantial funding from governments. Crowdfunding will never surpass that. But instead of thinking about crowdfunding as a replacement for government and state funding…
When the freshly-minted Prime Minister Tony Abbott declined for the first time since 1931 to appoint a science minister as part of his Cabinet in September last year, he did so having made an election…
It’s hard to ignore the irony. The 2014 federal budget will “better target innovation and research funding to areas of national and strategic priority” but funding cuts of more than A$111 million to CSIRO…
The Abbott government is hoping an A$11.6 billion infrastructure spending package, combined with a $20 billion medical research fund, will help soften the blow of widespread tightening of health and welfare…
It wouldn’t normally be cause for celebration when something related to cancer goes viral, but the recent #nomakeupselfie trend has been great news for charity-funded cancer research. The campaign has…
Innovation policy in the UK has taken on a medieval cast. No sooner do we have Catapult Centres, than there is a call for Arrow Projects. This is the headline recommendation of a report to government by…
The UK is investing less on research and development across both the public and private sectors and remains behind Europe on the proportion of its GDP spent on research, prompting leading academics to…
In a recent article in Times Higher Education, it was argued that crowdfunding could threaten government investment in science and research. Joe Cox, an economist from the University of Portsmouth suggested…
Like many scientists, I was apprehensive in advance about the Abbott government’s approach to science policy. Would it be pragmatic but fact-based or would it be ideological and politically driven? Sadly…
Within the European Union there is an East-West gap, in health and innovation. The gap is widening because eastern European member states (such as Poland, Romania, Latvia, Hungary and Slovakia) are winning…
At a time of much business debate around whether the UK should remain in the European Union (EU), there is one critical area being overlooked regarding the relationship – science. With a growing appreciation…
I’ve heard that we should stop talking about “pure” science and “applied” science; that we should only be talking about “good” science and “bad” science. Last year, CSIRO Chief Executive Megan Clark said…