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Swiss universities, such as Lausanne (above), look set to win a greater say on applied research projects.

Switzerland's main grant agency for basic research, the National Science Foundation (NSF), is seeking to increase the role of university researchers in identifying the topics of national research programmes — an idea that appears to have the government's support.

At the same time, however, the government is exploring new ways of coordinating and evaluating the teaching and research activities of universities, a move that some of these institutions feel could undermine their newly won autonomy.

At present, the Swiss government decides which targeted applied research programmes — or Schwerpunktprogramme — to finance. Seven such programmes are currently being funded on topics such as the environment, biotechnology, and information and communication, at a total cost of SFr63 million (US$46 million).

The NSF administers the programmes and provides 60 per cent of their budgets. The remaining money comes from the joint council of Switzerland's two technical universities (ETHs) in Zürich and Lausanne.

But the NSF is critical of the top-down decision-making approach in the Schwerpunktprogramme. Hans Peter Hertig, the foundation's secretary general, says that they are poorly integrated with other research at the universities in which they are based.

This is because the universities do not identify with research projects they have not been involved in selecting.

The NSF wants the Schwerpunktprogramme replaced by a new programme called ‘national research priorities’, which would give universities more freedom to determine individual research projects. The Swiss Department of the Interior (EDI) supports this idea, and will propose that the government should fund it, in its draft research and higher-education funding scheme for 2000-2003, to be published in November.

According to the proposal, 15 national research priorities — long-term interdisciplinary projects beyond the scope of a single university — would be created by 2003. Each would be modelled on the US National Science Foundation's Science and Technology Centres and similar projects in Germany. They would be based at universities, and involve interdisciplinary collaboration between academic and industrial scientists.

Researchers would be able to propose specific projects falling into one of the five areas of life sciences, environmental and climate research, information technologies and social sciences. Previously the choice of projects had been made by the government. The new programme should be announced in January, and, if approved by parliament, research on the first national research priorities should start in spring 2000. Funding would be expected to increase from SFr30 million in 2000 to SFr75 million in 2003.

The EDI would expect the NSF to reserve SFr148 million of its proposed SFr1,280 million 2000-2003 budget for co-funding the national research priorities, with the rest of the money coming from the ETH council and private foundations. But the NSF says it will do this only if its total budget is increased, as it does not wish to eat into funds earmarked for basic research.

The NSF is confident that the government will eventually make more money available. But Beat Vonlanthen, vice-director for science and research at the EDI, says that “due to the government's precarious financial situation” no increase could be considered before at least 2003. The agency's budget has decreased over the past four years, a fact that many scientists fear could threaten the traditional high standard of Swiss research (see Nature 388, 817; 1997).

Financial constraints have already led the EDI to propose streamlining university funding. Swiss universities, which are run by the cantons, as well as the federally run ETHs, have won significant financial and scientific autonomy in the past five years.

But the EDI now wants to re-integrate parts of the higher education and research system by creating a central body called Universitätskonferenz, to which the cantons would delegate responsibility for funding decisions. The Universitätskonferenz would also make the final decisions on which national research priorities are funded.

“We need to delegate policy and decision-making to a central body to improve collaboration between universities and federal research institutes and the coherence of university education,” says Vonlanthen.

The EDI also wants to centralize the evaluation of teaching and research, and plans to establish a central institute for university quality control in Bern.

But university rectors have mixed feelings about the proposed changes, which they feel would undermine their autonomy. Georges Fischer, secretary general of the Swiss Conference of University Rectors, says he feels uneasy. “We could be in for a conflict between promised autonomy and new orders from above.”