An Africa-wide scheme for research grants and scientific awards has been given high priority for financial backing by top African and European officials. 

Officials also agreed to give priority to a project strengthening Africa's ability to use science and technology to deal with food security problems. This would use the Nile basin as a "pilot case" for efforts to combine food production with effective water and land management. 

The projects are among six "early deliverables" highlighted by African Union (AU) and European Union (EU) officials at a meeting in Brussels, Belgium, last week (1 October). The officials identified these as priorities to receive support from a wide range of public and private sources, at regional, national and international levels.

The six were selected from 19 "lighthouse" projects identified by the African Union as deserving support, and providing a framework for implementing the 'Science, Information Society and Space' partnership agreed between Africa and Europe at a summit meeting of EU leaders in Lisbon, Portugal, last year (see Positive partnership clinched at EU–Africa summit).

The joint identification of priorities, as well as increased access by African scientists to top projects and networks involving European researchers, means that "research cooperation between Africa and Europe is expected to become more substantial, more focussed and more relevant," reads a joint statement issued after the Brussels meeting. 

The first objective of the research and scientific awards project is to set up a research programme to "promote sustainable science and technology research for Africa's technical, economic and social development".

It is also intended to strengthen the AU's capability to coordinate the implementation of that programme as a step towards what it describes as "an African framework programme for research".

The six highlighted projects also include two related to space. One — Kopernicus-Africa — would focus on remote sensing satellites for environmental and security tasks.

The second would build capacity within the AU Commission to use the geospatial sciences for a range of applications, including natural resources, food security, crisis management and renewable energies.

The remaining "early deliverable" projects relate to information and communication technologies. The AfricaConnect project will seek to integrate the African research community at both regional and international levels by improving bandwidth. And the African Internet Exchange System (AXIS) will support the growth of a continental African Internet infrastructure.

The lighthouse projects are based on priorities identified in the Consolidated Plan of Action (CPA), approved by African leaders at an AU summit meeting in 2007.

"The lighthouse projects represented the proposals of the AU Commission on the best way of implementing the CPA, for which both the will and the interest now exists," says Abdul Hakim Elwaer, head of the AU commission's directorate for human resources, science and technology, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

"We are keen to put forward not just a shopping list for Africa, but complete projects that are ready to be funded.

The source, URL: http://www.scidev.net/en/news/europe-backs-african-research-gran...

Many of you know that I have my favorite blogs and I regularly check in with Derek Lowe over at "Corante: In the Pipeline." Derek once worked at "Wonder Drug Factory," which was not too far away from where I currently am working. Now, he is in Boston. He shares his posts regularly on this blog: http://pipeline.corante.com/

I wanted to share a recent posting with you, which covers some insights into understanding 'open-source science.' He points out that coming from industry with IP laws and such, the idea doesn't really make sense for him. However, upon closer inspection, Derek points out that science really has been 'open-source' from the beginning. Of course, since the very idea of having an idea is important for getting grants, putting thoughts into cyberspace is, at least for many of us, risky.

"August 22, 2008
Open Source Science?
Posted by Derek

The Boston Globe has a piece on the open-source science movement. Many readers here will have come across the idea before, but it’s interesting to see it make a large newspaper. (Admittedly, the Globe is more likely to cover this sort of thing than most metropolitan dailies, given the concentration of research jobs around here).

The idea, as in open-source software development, is that everything is out in a common area for everyone to see and work on. (Here's one of the biggest examples). Ideas can come from all over, and with progress coming more quickly as many different approaches get proposed, debated, and tried out. I like the idea, in theory. Of course, since I work in industry, it’s a nonstarter. I have absolutely no idea of how you’d reconcile that model with profitable intellectual property rights, and I haven’t seen any scheme yet that makes me want to abandon profit-making IP as the driver of commercial science. Of course, there's always the prize model, which is worth taking seriously. . .

Even for academic science, open source work runs right into the traditional ideas of priority and credit, and the article doesn’t resolve this dilemma. (As far as I can tell, the open-source science advocates haven’t completely resolved it, either). There’s always the lingering (or not-so-lingering) worry about someone scooping your results, and for academia there’s always that little question of grant applications. There have been enough accusations over the years in various fields of people lifting ideas during grant proposal reviews or journal refereeing to make you wonder how well a broader open-source system would work out, given the small but significant number of unscrupulous people out there.

On the other hand, maybe if things were more open in general, there would be less incentive to lift ideas, since the opportunities to do so wouldn’t be so rare. And if someone’s name is associated from the beginning with a given idea, on some open forum, it could make questions of priority easier to resolve. A subsidiary problem, though, is that there are people who are better at generating ideas than executing them – some of these folks, once unchained, could end up with their fingerprints on all sorts of things that they’ve never gotten around to enabling. Of course, that might be a feature rather than a bug: people who generate lots of ideas are, after all, worth having around. And over time, there might well be less of a stigma than there is now for someone else to follow up on these things.

The thing is, science has already been a form of open-source work for hundreds of years now. It’s just that the information has been shared at a later stage, though presentations and publications, rather than being put out there right after it’s been thought up or while it’s being generated. That’s why I always shiver a bit when I read about how long Isaac Newton waited before writing up any of his results – if Edmund Halley hadn’t pressed him to do it, he might never have gotten around to it at all, which would have been a terrible tragedy.

And it’s why stories like those told of physicist Lars Onsager strike me as somehow wrong. Onsager was famous for only publishing his absolute best work – which was pretty damned good – and putting the rest into his copious file cabinets (example here). (A related trait was that he was also apparently incapable of lecturing at any comprehensible level about his work). Supposedly, younger colleagues would come by once in a while and tell him about some interesting thing that they’d worked out, and ask him if he thought it was correct. Onsager would pause, dig through his files, pull out some old unpublished work that the new person had unknowing duplicated, and say “Yes, that’s correct”. It seems to me that you don’t want to do that, withholding potentially useful results for the sake of what is, in the end, a form of vanity.

And although I'm not exactly Lars Onsager, this is as good a time as any to mention that my summer student, who’s finishing up in the lab this week, has been able to generate a lot of interesting data, and that I’m going to be trying to write it up this fall for publication. Readers may be interested to know that this work is based on more ideas I’ve had in the vein of the “Vial Thirty-Three” project detailed here, so with any luck, people will eventually be able to see some of what I’ve been so excited about all this time. And that’s about as open-source as this industrial scientist can get!"

Things are finally coming to a crux with regard to federal funding. Dr. Zerhouni (NIH director) has opened the discussion to grantees, including postdocs. See what is going on....

http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i15/15a00102.htm

Incidentally, and as Dr. Zerhouni pointed out at the 2007 BioVision.Nxt meeting, the NIH (US) supports international research, so this, in effect, is an interesting issue for all. I think that there are also some key lessons with regard to economics. Unprecedented growth in budget allocations... stagnant budgets = lots of trainees/postdocs...