core task

Research

The Research Policy of recent years has been very successful. The output of new knowledge and new researchers has increased and we have seen increasing success in raising external funds, in all fields of science. We can only maintain this trend by further deploying internal research funds as a lever for competitively acquiring external research funds. For research evaluations, we want to further develop good practices with the Coalition on Advancing Research Assessment. The scientific enterprise is competitive: so many creative minds with exceptional ideas and too few resources to realise them all. On the one hand, this competition ensures a higher quality of project applications, but on the other hand, the writing and evaluation process is time-consuming and adds to frustration when a good project cannot be funded. External competition is inevitable, but internally, by distributing the money in a less competitive and more connective way, we can reduce the negative effects and put more groups and people in an even better position for competitive external research funding. If we do that smartly, based on responsible trust, we can leverage more professors.
Key points of our proposed policy, obviously for consultation with the Research Council, are:

• Newly appointed ZAP members are automatically given start-up credit.
• We aim to permanently maintain a number of domains in which UAntwerpen has a strong international position. Identifying those domains should not be driven from above, but grow from the bottom up through research groups that work together and where the excellence of this teamwork is recognised by external reviews. These strong groups can then make ample use of acquired external resources for their re - the university just needs to ensure that the framing of such a group is maintained.
• Non-competitive internal project funding. We propose to convert a significant part of the current competitive formats into non-competitive funds. During the first few years, we use these mainly to temporarily accommodate quality projects that just failed to be funded externally, providing more security for researchers. As the currently ongoing projects come to an end, the Research Council will have more opportunities to then use them further creatively in various non-competitive ways, e.g. also as a core funding for pilot studies, or to enable middle management for a number of collaborating ZAP.

At our university, there is clever research taking place that has both scientific and societal impact. Much of the research is unfortunately not well known, even internally. In the coming years, we want to give researchers plenty of support with communication and dissemination both to the wider public and to specialised groups, to ensure that there is a greater awareness both internally and externally of the impact of the research they are all too proud of. Only if we are more aware of each other's research can we also look at how we can connect across disciplines to make even greater strides towards relevant, top research projects whose impact can be many times greater than if done independently.