Resposta de Pereira dos Santos à Science Europe: DUPONT & DUPOND

                                             


A mensagem de Manuel Pereira dos Santos, professor na Universidade de Évora, aqui divulgado, mereceu este comentário da Science Europe, presidido por Miguel Seabra, mas nenhum(por enquanto) da European Science Foundation:

11 settembre 2014 at 08:56

Dear Professor Pereira Dos Santos, in your post there seems to be a certain degree of confusion regarding the nature and remit of Science Europe. Science Europe is not a new name for the European Science Foundation, it is the already existing (since November 2011) European Association of currently 52 public national Research Funding and Research Performing Organisations. Its current President, Professor Miguel Seabra, has been elected by Science Europe members and has just taken up this role, which is additional to his post at FCT. Science Europe is a research policy organisation; it does not have any review panels and does not carry out any reviews or evaluations of institutions or projects. Finally Science Europe has always stressed the need for adequate funding for research in all scientific domains at national and European level and has strongly argued against cuts to public science budgets. For further details about the organisation I invite you and the readers of this blog to go to Science Europe’s website:http://www.scienceeurope.org.

Kind regards,

Elena Torta (Science Europa)

Eis a resposta de Pereira dos Santos:

DUPONT & DUPOND

I know that European Science Foundation (ESF) and Science Europe  (SE) are not exactly the same organization with a different name:  all the "science policy activities" have been transferred from ESF  to SE", ESF becoming only an "international evaluation service

provider", that is, keeping the major profiting parts (that for the first time ever ESF is experimenting on the whole Portuguese research system, at the demand of Prof. Miguel Seabra, the present Presidente of SE). 

A quick look at ESF and SE sites indeed show how they are "completely different institutions": 

- ESF has 66 organizations, from 28 countries, and SE only 57

organizations from only 28 countries;

- 54 of the 57 organizations (95%) of SE are also members of ESF,

coming from the same 25 of the 28 countries;

- the activities of SE have been "transferred" from ESF.

Sorry if it reminds me of the cartoon characters Dupont &Dupond. from Tintin - Thomson e Thompson in English. 

But there is a "significant" difference: ESF was involved in the discussions of the European Recommendation of 2005 (the Chart and  the Code of Conduct for the Recruitment of Researchers), but the Roadmap of SE only refers the Code but ignores the Chart. In fact, during the ministerial negotiations, the President of FCT - and now also of Science Europe - was against implementing the rights of researchers as they are stated in the Chart, because "it was too expensive", and the he preferred "grants" to "contracts" for them.

M. Pereira dos Santos
(Full Professor of Physics)
mpsantos@fct.unl.pt