At the start of the new millennium, the European Commission . “The situation is urgent,” it said in an official communication. Europe was falling ever further behind the US and Japan in research investment and researcher numbers, while large numbers of European scientists were relocating stateside. “Without concerted action to rectify this the current trend could lead to a loss of growth and competitiveness in an increasingly global economy,” the commission warned.
But it also had a solution: a “European research area” (ERA). This would be a “single market for knowledge, research and innovation”, within which researchers and knowledge could circulate without legal or practical obstacles. Differing national regulations around factors such as career development, grant mobility, visa conditions and pension rights would be overcome, establishing, in effect, a United States of Europe in research.
The free circulation of researchers – sometimes called Europe’s “”, on top of the free circulation of – became an official objective of the EU in 2009, when it was added to the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union.
National governments asked the commission to fully implement the ERA by 2014, and at a Brussels conference in 2012, the then European commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn was bullish about the initiative’s potential to stimulate growth, avoid research duplication and promote both collaboration and competitiveness, thereby driving up quality.
“We can’t continue with a situation where research funding is not always allocated competitively, where positions are not always filled on merit, where researchers can’t take their grants across borders, where large parts of Europe are not even in the game, and where there is a scandalous waste of female talent,” she said.
However, 13 years on from that speech and a full quarter of a century on from the idea’s inception, the ERA is still some way short of becoming a reality.
The commission has repeatedly acknowledged that progress could be faster, prompting a series of revitalising efforts from 2020 known as the “new ERA”. The renewed push established an advisory group to the commission, the ERA Forum, as well as the first ERA , setting out 20 voluntary “actions” that could be taken by stakeholders – from individual universities to EU officials – toward fully establishing the ERA.
Last October, however, an official on ERA implementation concluded that while “significant strides” had been taken towards establishing the ERA, “Europe’s R&I system is still marked by considerable disparities and fragmentation between Member States and regions”, with voluntary recommendations not being enough to address structural barriers.
The potential of the ERA is vast, sector leaders say. Lidia Borrell-Damián, secretary-general of Science Europe, an association of major research funding and research-performing organisations, told 探花视频 that the ERA “could, and should, create a European ecosystem for research” that guarantees freedom of movement, research excellence, academic freedom, institutional autonomy and an inclusive research culture.
That vision is shared by Julien Chicot, head of research and innovation policy at the Guild of European Research-Intensive Universities. “Science is a global effort, but in Europe, despite the efforts of the European Union, our research systems are still very national,” he said. “There’s a lot of missed opportunity: a smoother flow of knowledge would increase productivity and the excellence of what we produce.”
Moreover, the issue is no longer about merely boosting European competitiveness in the global research endeavour. Some commentators argue that it is as much about preserving the health of that global research endeavour itself in light of security concerns that threaten collaboration with science’s rising superpower, China, and the damage being done to its traditional superpower, the US, by the Trump administration’s ideologically driven grant cancellations and proposal to slash the budgets of the country’s two major science funders, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the (NSF). ?
“Given recent geopolitical developments, threats to academic freedom and the growing importance of research security, in my view, a unified European approach to research and innovation is more important than ever,” said Vincent Klein Ikkink, adviser for research at the science and technology university group CESAER. “The European Research Area is very significant in today’s global context, as it can play a central role in addressing these opportunities and challenges collectively.”
EU efforts to attract US-based researchers looking to relocate would also be more compelling with a fully fledged ERA, added Chicot: “You could say to a researcher that they can come to Europe and then they can move easily between France, Italy, Estonia, Norway. They won’t have access only to a small research system; they will have access to a very large research system.”
The “significant progress” in implementing the ERA that the council acknowledged centres on a rich alphabet soup of new bodies and initiatives.
For instance, the first ERA Policy Agenda, which established a series of voluntary actions for 2022-24, provided “the boost that was needed to do something concrete” on research assessment reform, said Vinciane Gaillard, director of research and innovation at the European University Association (EUA) – and from that boost emerged the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment, or CoARA. Gaillard also highlighted the creation of the European Competence Framework for Researchers, or ResearchComp, a tool created “to assess and develop researchers’ transferable skills and foster career development”.
Meanwhile, Science Europe’s Borrell-Damián said the , which describes itself as a “platform for dialogue and cooperation between national governments, the European Commission, and stakeholders in research and innovation”, had created “a much more robust and inclusive governance system involving direct and regular dialogue between [EU] member states and research and innovation stakeholders”.
Sergej Mo?ina, former co-chair of the ERA Forum and Slovenia’s research attaché at the EU, lauded ERA-related work on gender equality, which has seen research institutions and funders adopt Gender Equality Plans, or GEPs. And the Mo?ina added, “has enabled the construction of dozens of world-class pan-European research infrastructures”.
Yet for all the technocratic progress, the big vision of the ERA still doesn’t have wide currency, he conceded. Even 25 years after its conception, the ERA can still “sometimes feel like an insider’s conversation”, Mo?ina admitted: “What the ERA actually is and aims to achieve remains limited to a rather small circle.”
Hence, despite the steep rise in the amount the EU spends on research since 2000, national research systems remain fragmented – not least because investment in them continues to lag in some EU member states, according to Borrell-Damián.
She also worries about the growing threats to freedom of research and institutional autonomy in some countries. “Equality, diversity and inclusion is also increasingly under threat, with attempts to weaken the Gender Equality Plans and the weakening of EDI provision in the FP10 and MFF proposals,” Borrell-Damián warned, referring to the EU’s next , which will fund EU programmes, including the 10th?research “framework programme”, Horizon Europe, from 2028 to 2032.
The failure to get the ERA fully up and running has also meant that European researchers have missed out on the opportunity it offers to amplify their voices on the political stage. One example, according to the guild’s Chicot, is that politicians “really considered the research perspective seriously” in formulating new protections around the use of personal data.
“If [the ERA] had been strong enough two or three years ago, maybe we could have better influenced all this regulation and made sure that we had good provision to facilitate access and reuse of data for research purposes,” he said. “Now, it’s very messy.”
Asked what is standing in the way of a fully realised ERA, experts often cite a fundamental obstacle to many an EU initiative: the fact that, as Chicot puts it, “you have to convince the member states to delegate some of their power to the commission”. That reluctance is why the ERA Policy Agenda is voluntary – but, as a result, it has done little to unlock the “free circulation of researchers, scientific knowledge and technology”, said CESAER’s Klein Ikkink.
Enter the ERA Act. Due to be presented in 2026, this initiative is expected to establish in law some of the Policy Agenda’s suggestions in areas – as a February from the European Council put it – “assessed as needing binding rules or structures in order to achieve the objectives of the ERA over and above voluntary coordination and cooperation measures. This should substantially reduce the fragmentation of R&I policies and systems within the EU.”
Again, we have been here before. Back in 2012, commissioner Geoghegan-Quinn described the case for legislating for the ERA as “compelling” – though she conceded that it could take a “very long time” and proposed instead to ask governments and funders, in the meantime, to sign up to “a small number of big-ticket items that will make the biggest impact on the economy”, such as grant mobility, merit-based recruitment and measures to support female scientists. She also pledged to “name and shame” countries that drag their feet on implementation, but little came of the proposals.
Now that we have finally got to the point where legislating appears politically feasible, how ambitious should the act be?
For her part, the EU’s research and innovation commissioner, Ekaterina Zaharieva, has suggested that the act will be ambitious. “If it’s an act which repeats more or less basic principles that we have already in the treaties, I don’t see a big sense [in] proposing this act,” she . Among the issues she wants to be addressed are researcher mobility, research career development and incentivising public and private R&I investment.
The EUA’s Galliard agrees that “if we have to prioritise anything, it should be to establish “formal conditions for researcher mobility”, among them simplified visa rules for non-EU citizens and harmonised pension schemes. The act should also implement measures to “make research careers more attractive, more sustainable and more flexible”, she added.
A more controversial question is what to do about the diverse national investment levels in research and investment. The EU goal of spending 3 per cent of each country’s GDP on R&I – set shortly after the ERA was first proposed, at an – remains out of reach in many countries, with the EU average seemingly stagnant at about 2.2 per cent.
An initiative to get things moving in the desired direction will almost certainly be part of the ERA Act, but the sector is divided on what that initiative should be. Both the Coimbra Group of European universities and the League of European Research-Intensive Universities (LERU) have called for a legally binding investment target. But the latter group now calls the 3 per cent goal “too little too late”. In its to the commission’s call for evidence, LERU said countries “must do better, more, and faster, as well in the public sector as in the private sector. The ERA Act must put forward a (legally binding) Union-level target of investing 4% of Union GDP in R&D.”
Others, however, have urged caution. “Of course there are a lot of things that we want to be achieved, but we also need to be realistic,” said the guild’s Chicot. “We are really in favour of more public investment, but we know that if you put spending targets in the legislation, the member states will hate it and the ministers of finance will maybe even try to kill it. It’s very sad, but that’s the reality in which we live.”
Some are also sceptical that even legislating for 3 per cent would be enough to fulfil an investment target introduced more than two decades ago and towards which progress has been sluggish. “Will the ERA Act all of a sudden just change things? I don’t think so,” said the EUA’s Gaillard.
But whatever the caveats, there are hopes that the ERA Act might finally prompt some substantive progress towards making the ERA a reality.
“I think the commission is extremely ambitious,” said Chicot. “I’m not sure they can achieve everything that they want to achieve, but they could do some very nice things that could actually accelerate the ERA – perhaps on data sharing for research purposes, access to research infrastructures and mobility of researchers.
“If the ERA Act works out, it will be a major, major achievement.”
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