Academics have little interest in the notion of UK research councils establishing a fund specifically for international collaboration, a survey has revealed.

As UK universities grapple with the prospect of European research funding drying up post-Brexit, one idea that has been mooted is for research councils to launch a separate pot of funding for academics who want to apply for joint grants with foreign partners.

But Jonathan Adams, who was until recently chief scientist at Digital Science, said that a snapshot survey of scholars suggests that there is little appetite for such a programme in the academic community.

Speaking at Universities UK International¡¯s International Higher Education Forum, Dr Adams said that the results of the study, which was conducted by Digital Science for Universities UK, show that ¡°individual researchers are very good at managing their own arrangements¡± with foreign scholars.

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¡°Out of this, we also see quite a strong resistance to the idea that there should be a national strategic organisation to support international research collaboration,¡± he said. ¡°Individuals know who they want to work with [and] they know why they want to work with them.¡±

He added that a government or top-down strategy would likely identify ¡°very large, grand challenge-level¡± research and countries to work with, but would not necessarily determine ¡°whether or not there is a possibility of an effective functional working relationship between two research groups¡± on niche areas of research.

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¡°So actually having UK Research and Innovation set these grand strategic goals and say that there is going to be money for this is not necessarily the best way forward,¡± he said.

The study, which will be released later this year, also surveyed researchers in other countries, as well as staff who manage institutional-level partnerships in universities.

Dr Adams, who will start as director of Clarivate Analytics¡¯ Institute for Scientific Information next month, said that comments from researchers in Australia, a country that has ¡°tried this strategic approach¡± to international collaboration, suggest that it ¡°ended up supporting research which is not necessarily as good as research that they could have supported domestically¡±.

Speaking to Times Higher Education afterwards, Dr Adams said that the ¡°problem with funding international research at the national level is there is a real risk that it will fund second-rate stuff¡±.

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A top-down strategic approach also would not address the fact that researchers who want to collaborate internationally are most in need of ¡°small-scale money¡± for activities such as travel and workshops, rather than large-scale money that they can already apply for through existing programmes.

However,?Michael Hengartner, president of the University of Zurich and of the Swiss Rectors¡¯ Conference, told the same panel how Switzerland had ¡°set up with Germany and Austria a clever bilateral system¡± where researchers across the countries write joint grants that can be submitted to any of the three countries¡¯ funding councils.

¡°It gets submitted once [and] if that panel says ¡®yes¡¯ [it is] approved,¡± he said, thereby removing the danger of a ¡°double jeopardy¡± problem.

¡°This simplifies the system dramatically and it makes collaboration across borders identical to collaborations with a town next door,¡± he said.?¡°That¡¯s something that I think is scalable¡­I would suggest let¡¯s do the same thing between Switzerland and the UK.¡±

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ellie.bothwell@timeshighereducation.com