Does it mean “As excellent as possible”, “as beneficial as possible for the society”, or maybe “as much as possible”? Most people would say that one has to find the right balance between quality, relevance and quantity.
What is certain, however, is that almost all of our research today is externally funded through support for small and large research projects. Nearly 40 percent of the Faculty’s approx. 2 billion in revenue comes from external projects, of which NFR contributes 22 percent. We cannot opt out of conducting research that can be financed with external and therefore competitive funds.
Being a research-intensive comprehensive university, we compete to achieve research funds both based on excellence as the only criteria and in research areas where societal relevance has varying degrees of significance. Today, about 80 percent of our funding from the EU comes from the European Research Council (ERC) solely on the basis of scientific excellence.
Is the competition for excellence a threat to academic freedom?
It has been argued that the pursuit of excellence is a threat to academic freedom, and it is undoubtedly true that the competitive bidding of almost all research funds puts limitations on possible research areas. However, if we do not participate in these competitions, we lose almost every opportunity to conduct research that relies on funding, which would limit our academic freedom to a far greater degree. Many will probably also claim that it is unreasonable for all university-employed researchers to have full freedom to conduct research on exactly what they want.
The universities undoubtedly have a duty to focus some of their resources on major societal challenges, and the EU’s new framework program “Horizon Europe” is increasing their focus on specific societal challenges. Our social responsibility is clearly expressed in UiO’s strategy 2030, which is entitled “Knowledge – Responsibility – Commitment: For a Sustainable World”.
Securing both research funding and academic freedom
My most important task as Vice Dean of Research is therefore to enhance our ability to succeed in the competition for research funding from excellence arenas, such as ERC and NFR’s program for basic research (FRIPRO) and the Centres of Excellence, in addition to the thematic programs aimed at societal challenges.
In our platform launched in connection with the Dean's election, we emphasize that sustainability will form an important basis for all priorities at the Faculty. Therefore, the future research supported by the Faculty must also be in accordance with the focus on sustainability. That is the reason why we cannot support the establishment of centers or other resource-intensive environments at the Faculty that for example focus on increased extraction of petroleum. Nevertheless, we want to protect academic freedom to the extent that individual researchers will be able to research almost anything they want, including petroleum recovery, as long as they stay within Norwegian law and ensure that their research is completely funded by external sources.
Analyzing previous research initiatives
The previous Deanery supported both excellence focused research and relevance oriented research in a number of ways, for example by establishing Strategic Research Initiative and Innovation Clusters. This spring the Research Administration at the Faculty and I have arranged meetings with these research environments to learn about their success stories and their more challenging aspects. The Research Administration has also collected data from NFR’s evaluations of the Faculty’s research project applications in the period from 2015 up until today. We are still working on analyzing this information, but some general aspects already seem quite clear:
- Many of the research projects with the most significant scientific innovation and with many positive ripple effects (meaning a high degree of scientific productivity, high degree of originality, additional external funding, ERC/SFF applications of high quality etc.) was led by younger researchers and often included interdisciplinary elements.
- Some of the most innovative projects led by younger researchers have emerged outside, on the outskirts of, or between centers and other heavy research environments.
- PhD Fellows often work best in research projects where they can also collaborate with other PhD Fellows.
- Interdisciplinary projects often fall between chairs in the University’s organizational structure and experience more practical challenges than discipline-based projects, for example that the parties involved are often not co-located.
- Younger talented researchers in permanent positions often have a very high workload with teaching and other compulsory work in a period of life where many also have small children and a demanding family situation.
- The feedback on the research excellence applications may indicate that young talents should be bolder in project selection, with more focus on “high risk - high gain” elements, and focus less on “safe” projects that are more easily perceived as “incremental science”.
- We do relatively poorly in competitions for funding from innovation-oriented programs.
- We lack an overall strategy for strengthening and coordinating sustainability-relevant research at the Faculty.
Based on these findings and further information that will emerge through this evaluation, we will throughout the summer and following autumn work out a plan for how the Deanery and the Research Administration at the Faculty, in collaboration with our departments and centres, can contribute to aid innovative, excellent, fundable and hopefully also sustainability-relevant research initiatives at our Faculty.