N°10, 2nd October 2008
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Seventh Research Framework Programme (FP7)
Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme (CIP)
Tenders Electronic Daily (TED)
The EARTO Secretariat is now safely installed in its new offices, located at 36-38 Rue Josef II, B-1000 Brussels. The nearest metro station is Arts/Loi. Click here to view on a map.
Our telephone and fax numbers and e-mail addresses all stay the same.
The new facilities include a meeting room for up to 12, which is available for use by members for their meetings. Further details here.
Also at the same address are the Brussels offices of SINTEF, TNO and VTT as well as EuroGeoSurveys.
Sylvia Lopomo and Mikael Kekkonen joined the EARTO Secretariat on October 1st.
Sylvia will be generally responsible for running the day-to-day buiness of the Secretariat, including handling enquiries with members and managing the meeting room. She joins us after six years working as a secretary and administrative assistant in the European Commission, mostly in DG RTD. Sylvia's principal working languages are English, French and Italian; she also has a basic understanding of Dutch, Danish and Slovenian.
Mikael comes to EARTO after working for two-and-half years as a Committee Assistant to Finnish MEP Reino Paasilinna, the socialist coordinator in the Committee for Energy, Industry and Research (ITRE). Mikael started working for Reino Paasilinna when the final negotiations on FP7 were taking place in the Parliament and since then has tracked Community research initiatives such as the CIP, JTIs and Article 169 initiatives. He also assisted Dr. Paasilinna to draft and negotiate his report on the European Institute for Innovation and Technology (EIT) through the Parliament.
Mikael has worked previously as a Seconded National Expert in DG REGIO and done an internship in DG RTD. He speaks Finnish and English and understands French and Swedish.
From left to right: Chris Hull, Sylvia Lopomo, Kadija Taffah, Nina Baumeister and Mikael Kekkonen
As reported in several earlier issues of EARTO News, the Commission is increasing the number of ex post audits of closed FP6 projects.
Many EARTO members have been audited. These audits are proving extremely problematic because the auditors are challenging cost reimbursement practices which previously had been acceptd by the Commission, in particular relating to the use of average personnel costs as well as the inclusion of overhead in daily rates. Some RTOs have been told that they may be required to reimburse large sums of money to the Commission.
For about a year now there have been discussions at a senior technical level with the Commission - both through EARTO and between individual RTOs and the Commission - to try to resolve the issues. But there is practically no movement. We appear to have reached a stalemate.
Consequently, the CEOs of the major RTOs, at their six-monthly EUROTECH meeting on September 27th, decided to establish a Task Force of senior financial managers and senior legal officers to prepare a common position vis-a-vis the Commission. The Task Force will address not ony the financial and administrative issues raised by the Commission, and practical ways of resolving them, but also the legality of the Commission's actions and of its interpretations of the FP6 Financial Guidleines and other relevant legal documents. The Task Force members will liaise closely with their national governments.
For further information, please contact Christopher John Hull
The second meeting of the EARTO Working Group on Quality and Excellence in RTO Management will be on October 8th, in Brussels, and will focus on customer satisfaction measurement and follow-up.
The general format of the meeting will be presentations by the participating members on the methods they use to measure customer satisfaction, how they process the feedback received, and how they draw conclusions and implement consequences. Presentations will be made by SP Group, ECN, TNO, AIMEN, CRP Henri Tudor, and STFI.
Additional members interested in joining the Group should please contact Nina Baumeister.
AERTOs is an ERA-NET project among five of the larger RTOs in the EARTO-EUROTECH Special Interest Group: FhG (Project Coordinator), CEA, SINTEF, TNO and VTT.
The aim of this three-year project is to identify and implement long-term cooperation programmes among the participating RTOs. But the project is not a closed shop: the intention is that other RTOs will be invited to join specific cooperation programmes once they have been launched, and EARTO is participating in the project as a subcontractor in order to provide the interface between the present project participants and other RTOs.
AERTOs began in the spring of this year, and the first possible areas of long-term cooperation are beginning to emerge. A workshop among RTO executives responsible for SME services produced a proposal to try to develop common innovation management diagnostic tools and a cross-border technology transfer facility among RTOs and their SME customers. Also, the RTOs who have met twice during the past year as an EARTO Working Group on Human Resource Management plan to meet again under the auspices of AERTOs and to work towards a possible common career development programme for strategic/international programme and project managers.
A large number of FP7 Calls for Proposals were published on September 3rd - see the link at the top of the newsletter - which is an appropriate opportunity to remind all members of the EARTO FP7 Proposal Preparation Service.
The service provides independent expert advice to help members prepare FP7 proposals, including full review of proposals prior to submission.
The service is provided by four independent consultancies carefully selected and monitored by the EARTO secretariat.
Full details are available in the members' area of the EARTO website.
For further information, please contact Nina Baumeister.
This service gives EARTO members a simple-to-use tool for comparing how well they are doing in FP7 compared with other RTOs. It is a benchmarking database in which you record the numbers of proposals you have submitted (or in which you are a participant), how many have passed the evaluation threshold, and how many have been accepted for funding. You can make comparisons with other RTOs accoring to size category and in different FP7 thematic priority areas. Submitted data are treated confidentially and are presented anonymously.
Access to the service is via the members' area of the EARTO website.
For further information, please contact Nina Baumeister.
The forthcoming EARTO Executive Board meeting in Ljubljana on October 23rd and 24th will feature a seminar with the Slovenian Minister for Research on the role of RTOs in supporting national economic and social development as well as a special address by European Research Commissioner Janez Potocnik.
EARTO gives space in this newsletter to members who would like to publish their job vacancies. Please contact Nina Baumeister.
November 8 - 9, 2010
ESWIRP first workshop, Cologne, Germany
October 27, 2010
EARTO Innovation Prize - ceremony
October 11 - 15, 2010
2nd European Innovation Summit
September 23, 2010
DESCA Consultation Group Meeting
September 22, 2010
DESCA Core Meeting
September 16, 2010
EARTO Communication Task Force, Brussels
September 15, 2010
EARTO Innovation Prize Jury Meeting, Brussels
EU Research Commissioner Janez Potocnik launched his Sounding Board for Smaller FP Actors in the run-up to FP7 as a mechanism to help ensure that the rules and regulations for the implementation of the Seventh Framework Programme would be adapted to the needs of SMEs and smaller research organisations. The Secretary General of EARTO and two EARTO members are among the 20 members of the Sounding Board.
The Sounding Board has now been reconvened to advise on the "simplification" measures introduced by the Commission since the launch of FP7. The first meeting took place on 24th September. Here is a summary of the main issues discussed.
• Exemption from the need to provide an audit certificate until a participant passes a threshold of €375,000. This is expected to result in 80% or more of FP7 participants never having to provide an audt certificate.
• Financial viability checks and bank guarantees will only be required of coordinators and participants requestiong greater than €500,000. This is expected to mean that almost 90% of FP7 participants will not be subjected to such checks and requirements. There have been reports of many SMEs wishing to act as Project Coordinators being informed by POs that this would not be possible and/or that they must necessarily provide a bank guarantee. This was apparently due to misunderstanding by individual POs.
• The Single Registration Facility (SRF) has been subject to much criticism for wrong classification of FP7 participants, slowness, refual of Project Officers (POs) to accept its classifications ... The Commission insists these problems have now been solved. The IT system is being modified so that an FP7 participant's SRF data are automatically transferred to the Grant Preparation Forms module without any possibility for a PO to make changes.
New simplification proposals presently under consideration in the Commission include the wider introduction of "lump sums" and "flat rates" in place of actual-cost reporting, e.g. standard country-specific tarifs for overnight visits or for categories of personnel. Discussion of this by the Sounding Board was extrememly robust with most participants arguing strongly in favour of real-cost reimbursement, for principally two reasons:
• First, flat rates and lump sums would almost certainly end up being criticised as being either too gnerous (by MEPs and the Court of Auditors, for example) or as too low (by FP7 participants): the perfect balance is most probably simply not achieveable.
• Second, flat rates and lump sums are a complication rather than a simplification when most FP7 participants use full-cost accounting: the same underlying transaction would have to be recorded differently as an expense and a receipt, with the difference allocated to another account.
The Commission also gave information that it is working on an IT template for scientific and financial project reporting.
The Members of the Sounding Board are to provide written input to the Commission before November 3rd with further proposals for simplification. Members wishing to contribute ideas are invited to contact Christopher John Hull
The Meeus website is operational again, after being briefly suspended for several days during August.
Meeus is an internet platform open to all FP7 users for exchanging experience and where less experienced Framwork Programme participants can ask their more experienced colleagues for advice.
Please contact Nina Baumeister for more infomation.
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The EARTO meeting room is available to members for meetings of 12 (14 absolute maximum), including light refreshments (coffee, tea, etc.) and the use of a projector, at €250 per day. Lunch arrangements are extra.
Members needing a larger meeting room are welcome to contact the Secretariat for advice.
For further information, please contact Sylvia Lopomo at the EARTO Secretariat: +32-2-5028698.
To subscribe or unsubscribe to this newsletter, please send an e-mail to baumeister@earto.eu.