Economist Achilleas Mitsos, one of Europe’s leading research policy-makers, has been tasked with a root and branch reform of the research system in his homeland, Greece.
Director general of the European Union’s research commission from 2000 to 2006, Mitsos has now been appointed general secretary for research in Greece’s new socialist government. He spoke to Nature about his ambitious plans to overhaul the research system of a country where money for science is scarce and cronyism is rife…
[Mitsos:] There is too little competition, too little evaluation of performance, and there is a lot of dead wood. Even scientists who do very little work continue to get a share of what little money there is for research. And most scientists are civil servants, so they are guaranteed employment until retirement.
… A large part of the academic community has always resisted the idea of quality control and evaluation, and in the past politicians have never insisted on it. Last year, the former [centre-right New Democracy] government did actually introduce a law that tried to address some of the problems, but it was overcomplicated and unworkable. [That wasn’t the problem. The problem was that in response to its introduction a zillion Greeks ran into the streets of Athens and started burning it down.]
… Greece is a small country, and we can’t expect to find evaluators and peer reviewers for all scientific areas within Greece who are both experts and free of conflict of interests. So we will have to involve foreign scientists. That means that all grant applications and research programmes will have to be written in English — I don’t see a problem with that. [Others certainly will.] …
November 5th, 2009 at 9:52PM
You needed to shift into SOS for this article. "…has been tasked with…", "root and branch reform", "There is too little competition…", "too little evaluation of performance," "dead wood", and "quality control and evaluation."
How would you feel if the guy was named general secretary for the improvement of poetry, and said "I have been tasked with improving poetry. I plan a root and branch reform. We need competition among poets. This has been shown to produce improvement in poetry, something our government could be proud of. We want to dig out the dead wood by doing performance evaluations. I will appoint people who will do quality control and evaluation. We will sail happily into a new land."
Really. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.