Munich

The Helmholtz Society, Germany's largest government-funded research organization, is expected to agree to sweeping reforms at its annual meeting in Berlin this week.

The reforms will introduce greater centralized control for the society's 16 research centres. The government proposed the changes earlier this year in an effort to increase the centres' relevance to industry and society, and to foster more collaboration and competition between the various sites.

The reform package will give the society's president and senate significantly more power to determine research goals and allocate funds, based on the result of scientific evaluations every five years.

But many Helmholtz researchers worry that this centralizing drive could undermine basic research and curtail their scientific independence.

Under the reforms, most of the organization's DM2.6-billion ($US1.2-billion) annual budget will be earmarked to six strategic programmes. Researchers say that this will make it hard for them to get external grants from funding agencies, such as the European Commission, which expect host institutions to cover infrastructure and overhead costs.

Walter Kröll: the centres will keep their autonomy.

In response to protests earlier this year, research minister Edelgard Bulmahn agreed to include “basic research” as one of the missions to be pursued by the society. “This is an important rider,” says Rudi Balling, scientific director of the German Research Centre for Biotechnology in Braunschweig, “but only time will tell if it keeps our scientific freedom alive.”

Walter Kröll, director of the German Space Agency, who is likely to be named in November as the Helmholtz's next president, defends the reforms. Research planning according to public demands “is not incompatible with scientific freedom”, he says. “The centres will be left with enough autonomy to develop their own scientific profiles.”

The first Helmholtz Society centres were set up in the 1950s to research atomic energy. Over the years, their activities have diversified and they now employ 8,000 researchers between them, and cover areas such as molecular genetics, cancer research, plasma and particle physics, space technology, and environmental, marine and polar research.