Complicated system discourages research 

ne of the major problems for Swedish research is the lack of direct government funding, Mattias Goksör points out.

– Researchers spend a lot of time filling out application forms to get funding for a project that, in a best case scenario, will run over a period of five years. If, after all this work, you get a grant, which is not guaranteed, co-funding from the department is often required. So, external funding can lead to the department’s room for manoeuvre, in terms of resources and recruitment, being constrained, which naturally is not the purpose of external funding. But paradoxically, a grant may become so expensive that a department is forced to decline.

As the direct government funding does not cover very much research, it has become more important over the past few decades to find ways of allocating the funding that the government does provide. Performance has become more important and that means things that can be measured, such as the amount of external funding, published articles and number of citations. This performance approach is repeated at every level: when the state provides funding to the universities, when the universities allocate the funds to the faculties, and when they in turn pass them on to the departments that give funds to individual researchers.

We have ended up with a system that not always leads to good research, Mattias Goksör points out.

– The depleted direct government funding means that not everybody is guaranteed research time, but must instead apply for funding for both his own and his employees’ wages. Researchers are forced to go where the money is and go for quick results rather than more longterm studies.

ince it is the number of publications that counts, rather than the quality of those publications, you have to break down the conclusions to the smallest possible unit. So even if there are still many interesting articles being written, the proportion that contain something truly new is smaller than it was 20 years ago, Giovanni Volpe points out.

– The system favours less respectable stakeholders, such as “predatory journals” that, often for a hefty sum, quickly publish articles that have not been through serious scientific review.

There are countries though, that have considerably more understanding of the fact that research requires time, Giovanni Volpe argues.

– In countries like Germany and Switzerland, a professor not only has a guaranteed wage, which is significantly higher than in Sweden, but is also guaranteed wages for a certain number of employees. The professor does not have to teach or apply for external funding if they do not want to, so has the opportunity to spend time on projects that span several decades. One example is Svante Pääbo at The Max Planck Institute in Leipzig who has worked with evolutionary genetics throughout his research life. The work he got the Nobel Prize for would not have been possible without it an internal financing of approximately 2 million euro in the early 2000s that was used for the sequencing of Neanderthal genome. It was a very risky job which could never have been financed with ordinary allowances. weden is the country in the European Union with the highest level of investment in research, approximately 3.4 percent of GDP. But that does not tell the full story, Mattias Marklund explains.

Curiosity and freedom is the very foundation for successful research, Giovanni Volpe points out.

– One might object that professors who are allowed to do what they want may spend their time on very inward-looking projects. And that may happen occasionally. But just as in other professional fields, most professors want to contribute as best they can to society, of which they are part.

– The lion’s share, around 70 percent, comes from the business community. And the part funded by the state leads to a vicious circle. For example, Akademiska Hus, the company that dominates the lease of premises to universities and colleges, is required to generate an annual profit of around 6 billion. That would be acceptable if the money had gone back into academia, but that is not the case. As government agencies, the institutions of higher education also have plenty of reporting requirements regarding quality and education, which take up both time and resources. We live in a society where it is important to check that money is spent wisely, but where it is not particularly important to find out how much is being spent on those checks. urrently, a significant part of the curiosity-driven research in natural and technical sciences is conducted at companies, and not only at universities, argues Mattias Marklund.

The advantage of external funding, where each project undergoes thorough scientific review, should be that it leads to better quality research. But instead the reverse seems to be the case, Mattias Goksör explains.

– An inquiry from 2018 by Stephen Hwang, then vice-chancellor of Halmstad University, suggested that external funding might be an expensive method of allocating funds, and secondly that countries with higher direct government funding than Sweden, such as Denmark, the Netherlands and Switzerland, generally have better quality research.

Denmark has eight universities while Sweden has around fifty higher-education institutions. This is one reason why the resources per institution of higher education is diluted. Another reason is that Swedish universities have so many professors, argues Mattias Goksör.

– When I started my third-cycle studies, I was just one of my professor’s doctoral students. Now, for financial reasons, it can be the other way around with several professors sharing one doctoral student. This is completely back to front, partly because we need young researchers, partly of course because research constantly has to rejuvenated. Since the government budget is unlikely to increase, the country’s higher-education institutions will probably need to cut back on the number of employees, just like Chalmers did two years ago. Eventually, more higher-education institutions will introduce a cap on the number of staff, at least that is my guess.

– Companies such as Astra Zeneca invest heavily in basic research. Private foundations are important as well, such as the Danish fund, Novo Nordisk, which grants 9 billion Danish krona each year, and whose funds also go to Swedish partnerships. This can be compared to the Wallenberg Foundations annual grants of around 2.2 billion Swedish krona. Among other things, Novo Nordisk is investing around 2 billion in building the world’s first quantum computer.

Infrastructure in particular is another field that requires enormous resources. Lund has Max IV, which is a national undertaking, as well as the European Spallation Source (ESS) which is a European consortium, Mattias Goksör tells us.

– The cost increases are enormous and the state will probably not add the corresponding funds in the research budget. Major projects are important, but

Parties to the conversation:

Mattias Goksör, Professor of Physics and former Pro-Vice Chancellor at the University of Gothenburg

Mattias Marklund, Professor of Theoretical Physics and Secretary General for the Scientific Council for Natural Sciences and Engineering Sciences at the Research Council smaller projects must also be able to receive funding, Mattias Marklund argues.

Giovanni Volpe, Professor of Physics, recently the recipient of an ERC grant for the project on Virtual tissue staining by deep learning (IFLAI). Recently a report was published by the OECD Public research funding in Sweden: optimising the system in response to multiple demands, which was commissioned by the government.

– If the government provides funding to Formas, for example, to conduct climate research there must be someone who has already started down that path and could receive the money. Because starting an entirely new research area takes several years, and an important role for universities is to support basic research within smaller areas that may grow into something larger.

We have to start thinking about what kind of system we want, Giovanni Volpe points out.

– Not everybody can be a professor. But those who do must be given the opportunity to do as good a job as possible, otherwise the title will lose its value and become fairly meaningless.