A kind correspondent has drawn to my attention the European Union's Court Of
Auditors' Special Report No 9/2007 "Evaluating the EU Research and
Technological Development (RTD) framework programmes ~W could the
Commission~Rs approach be improved?" published 30 January 2008 (Official
Journal of the European Union C 2008/26/01; 38 pages).
I dont think that this Report has been discussed here previously. The
details are rather above my head, but if you are interested in Activity
Based Budgeting, Evaluation Of Research, Evaluation Strategies, Intervention
Logic, Objective Setting, Performance Indicators, ... , you might well find
it useful to download the original [1].
And if you are interested in Open Access, see in particular paras 72-79
(pages 14-15), where the Court criticises the Commission. It seems that the
Commission was unable to give the Court of Auditors a citation analysis, or
even a list of publications, for the research that it has funded.
In reply to this criticism the Commission promises a new IT system (paras
72-74, page 36).
As readers will remember [2], the Commission is already collecting "... an
electronic copy of the published version or the final manuscript" of every
publication (FP7 Grant Agreement - Annex II General Conditions - Version
20.12.06 ISC clean 3) [3].
My correspondent suggests that the new IT system should simply take this
Repository of All FP7 Publications, and make it OAI-compliant, and harvestable.
Then when the Commission's performance in FP7 is evaluated, instead of being
criticised by the Court of Auditors, the Commission might even find itself
being congratulated.
N Miradon
[1]
http://eca.europa.eu/portal/pls/portal/docs/1/651520.PDF
[2]
http://listserver.sigmaxi.org/sc/wa.exe?A2=ind07&L=american-scientist-open-access-forum&D=1&F=l&O=D&P=46265
[3]
ftp://ftp.cordis.lu/pub/fp7/docs/annex2_general_conditions_20061222_en.pdf
Received on Sun Apr 27 2008 - 19:03:01 BST