Despite the occasional high-profile success, Spain has not really reached its potential in terms of scientific output. Is the problem cultural or it is directly related to limited resources? Perhaps it's a bit of both.

Spain has more than 150,000 scientific researchers, according to statistics collected by Eurostat (http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu) — but leading European research countries such as France and Britain have twice that number, and the United States has ten times as many. The gross domestic expenditure per researcher is half of that in France or Britain, and one-third of that in the United States. But this alone doesn't explain why Spain publishes so few papers in Science or Nature: 5 to 10 times fewer than France or Britain and 50 times fewer than the United States. It even publishes fewer than smaller countries such as the Netherlands or Switzerland.

One problem is that funding in Spain rarely provides for students or postdocs. The national funding agency, the CICYT, relies mostly on permanent staff to carry out the benchwork and each scientist is allowed to be full-time on only one project at a time. Competitive research requires substantially more resources. Regional funding may add a small yearly amount to the CICYT budget: European Union money could make a difference, but it reaches only a few exceptional projects and groups.

Spain should invest generous funding in a few outstanding institutes. It currently has some 'centres of excellence' — research facilities selected by the government. Unfortunately, these compete with other institutions for funding and have only limited additional resources to service and renew equipment and assist visiting scientists. They do not have privileged funding for students or technical personnel. Change does not look likely.

Even if Spain does invest in these centres, it must also address the problems documented in a recent study (A. Sibert Labour productivity growth in the European Union http://www.europarl.europa.eu/comparl/econ/emu/20061220/sibert_en.pdf): low productivity and weak collaboration among Spanish research groups. The country's scientists will have to earn the trust of tax-payers, funding agencies and potentially collaborative companies for Spanish science to reach its full potential.