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Performance based funding is used by most EU Member States to increase the performance of their public research system. This report analyses the different nature of systems in EU Member States, selected associated and third countries. It aims to inform Member States which are in a process of mutual learning to improve the design of their allocation systems.
• Research Performance based funding systems provide incentives to increase scientific performance and concentrates resources in well performing organisations
• The nature of systems in place differs widely
• The specific features of RPBF assessment designs can generate unintended consequences
• The assessment suggests RPBF as a potential avenue for several Member States
• The choice for specific designs, taking into accounts costs and potential benefits, should take into account the national context. More...

Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions: ICT Standardisation Priorities for the Digital Single Market (COM(2016) 176 final). More...

Staff Working Document (SWD(2016) 108): Implementation and Evaluation report accompanying the document "Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions: EU eGovernment Action Plan 2016 - 2020 - Accelerating the digital transformation of government COM(2016) 179" and SWD(2016) 109. More...

This paper investigates how product and labour market regulations and red tape affect the way in which top corporate research and development (R&D) investors worldwide organise their cross-border operations. The decision about where a company locates its international subsidiaries is modelled using location-specific framework conditions, socio-economic factors and other controls commonly used in the economic geography literature. The location decision drivers are estimated using a multilevel mixed-effects logistic regression, controlling for both fixed and random effects. Our results confirm that both product market regulation (PMR) and employment protection legislation (EPL) significantly affect the location decisions of top R&D investors, as well as red tape and profit tax. More...

Europe is the largest producer of scientific data in the world, but insufficient and fragmented infrastructure means this 'big data' is not being exploited to its full potential. By bolstering and interconnecting existing research infrastructure, the Commission plans to create a new European Open Science Cloud that will offer Europe's 1.7 million researchers and 70 million science and technology professionals a virtual environment to store, share and re-use their data across disciplines and borders. This will be underpinned by the European Data Infrastructure, deploying the high-bandwidth networks, large scale storage facilities and super-computer capacity necessary to effectively access and process large datasets stored in the cloud. This world-class infrastructure will ensure Europe participates in the global race for high performance computing in line with its economic and knowledge potential. More...

For Horizon 2020, the Commission has a legal obligation to monitor continually and systematically its implementation, to report annually and to disseminate the results of this monitoring. The first Annual Monitoring Report under Horizon 2020 is a comprehensive publication encompassing the analysis of Horizon 2020 through its calls closed in 2014
It helps identifying the most important issues related to performance as measured by the Key Performance Indicators, implementation aspects and participation trends, providing data for all priorities and specific objectives of Horizon 2020. The Report pays special attention to monitor progress with respect to the cross-cutting issues. It provides information also on the activities of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) as well as of the Euratom Research and Training Programme. Moreover, given the significant results and impacts that FP7 projects can still produce, the Annual Monitoring Report includes a section dedicated to results of ongoing FP7 projects.
Horizon 2020 Monitoring Report 2014. More...

This report by Brian Dodwell, Daniel Milton, and Don Rassler for the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point provide an analysis of the over 4,600 Islamic State foreign fighter records that emerged from the ‘Caliphate’ in early 2016. It presents information about foreign fighters’ countries of origin, citizenship, points of entry into Syria, marital status, skills and previous occupations, education levels, religious knowledge, fighting role preferences in the group, and previous jihadist experience. The analysis reveals an organization that is attempting to vet new members, manage talent effectively, and deal with a diverse pool of recruits. More...

As scientists’ careers unfold, mobility can allow researchers to find environments where they are more productive and more effectively contribute to the generation of new knowledge. In this paper, we examine the determinants of mobility of elite academics within the life sciences, including individual productivity measures and for the first time, measures of the peer environment and family factors. Using a unique data set compiled from the career histories of 10,004 elite life scientists in the U.S., we paint a nuanced picture of mobility. More...