munich

Italian universities — like those in Germany and Japan — suffer from a lack of internal competition for research funds, and are further disadvantaged by the fact that they have a smaller pot of public research money.

At the same time, full professors remain powerful, and have for many years successfully opposed the introduction of a more accountable system of allocating research funds, including compulsory peer review.

Until last year, national research grants were allocated by discipline-based committees whose members were elected by the academic community. Most appeared to be concerned primarily with avoiding conflict by ensuring that no scientist was left empty-handed.

The government wants to exercise greater control over the allocation of public research funds, to ensure both that more ‘transparent’ systems are introduced and that these funds are concentrated on fewer projects, in areas of strategic importance. It would like to see a general improvement in the quality of research in universities.

To achieve this, it has introduced a law dissolving the committees and replacing them with a single grant committee composed of five ‘wise men’ appointed by the research minister, Luigi Berlinguer. The five have now completed their first round of applications.

Despite concern in the academic community that five individuals would lack the breadth of expertise to select referees for the thousands of applications received, results suggest that concentration of research funds has for the first time been achieved.

The new grant system places more responsibility on individual universities, which have been slow to embrace the autonomy granted to them in the late 1980s. Now, only projects selected by the individual universities for internal funding are eligible for a top-up from national research funds.

So far, however, the government has failed to increase its control over university grant money distributed by the CNR, Italy's national research council. It wants eventually to remove CNR's role as a grant agency, and transfer the moneys to the general universities fund, over which it has more direct control.

Berlinguer has proposed a change in CNR's rules to allow this, but has so far been unable to overcome the inevitably strong resistance.