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Ritzen: mixed reaction to research proposals. Credit: AP

The Dutch government plans to increase central control over research spending by transferring DFl500 million (US$250 million) of university funds to the national research council, the NWO. The rules of the council — at present an independent agency — will be changed to allow the government to decide how the new money is to be spent.

The transfer would double the current NWO budget, and reduce that of the universities by 20 per cent. At the same time, the government wants to separate the administration of the NWO's 14 research institutes from its grant-giving activities, to avoid potential conflict of interest.

The plans, announced in September by Jo Ritzen, Minister of Education, Culture and Science, have been generally welcomed by the NWO. But they have been greeted with alarm by the universities, unwilling to lose control of the distribution of research funds.

Some of the NWO's discipline-orientated advisory groups, known as ‘foundations’, which recommend how grant money should be distributed, have also argued strongly against creating a new organizational structure for NWO research institutes, many of which are closely integrated into universities.

“It would isolate institutes from universities,” says Huup Eggens, head of the natural sciences foundation (FOM), which represents the high-energy physics community. Others express concern about the vagueness of Ritzen's plan to split the functions of the NWO. But they are optimistic that it could bring improvements. “The transition period has not been thought through in detail,” says Harvey Butcher, head of the Netherlands Foundation for Research in Astronomy and director of the NWO's institute for astronomy in Dwingeloo. “But there is room for improvement in the way our institutes are run, provided changes are carried out in a professional way.”

Dutch natural scientists also complain that the announcement of Ritzen's plans has accelerated the NWO's continuing internal restructuring process, which is intended to simplify its decision-making. The number of foundations has been cut from 34 to 20 over the past four years, but the NWO plans to eliminate this whole level of decision-making, and transfer its activities to the area councils which are responsible for much broader disciplines. Eggens says, however, that taking away control from the experts “will have a deleterious effect on the quality of research”.

Predictably, universities are upset at the prospect of losing control over a substantial proportion of their budgets. A spokesman for the Association of Universities, Jan-Willem Vos, says that such a drastic change could force redundancies among university staff. Vos says the universities feel cheated because they agreed only six months ago that the NWO would distribute DFl200 million from the universities' budget to the ten university research groups judged, through open competition, to be working in research areas designated as strategic priorities by the NWO.

But Ritzen says that the transfer would be carried out over a few years, to avoid disruption within universities. He says his plan would increase competition between universities and allow the government to have a role in setting research priorities based on industrial and social needs that is more in line with its European Union neighbours.

Hein Meijers, a spokesman for the NWO, says the organization is happy for the government to help define priority research areas — provided that the proportion of its funds used for strategic research does not exceed 50 per cent.