French researchers have decried plans to label a quarter of the laboratories supervised by the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) flagship “Keylabs”, with more than 10,000 backing a call for CNRS president Antoine Petit to resign.
CNRS said that the label, announced last month, would allow the research organisation to “focus specific efforts on a smaller number of units that can legitimately claim to be ‘world-class’”.
While the selected laboratories have yet to be confirmed, CNRS said recipients of the Keylabs label would be “best placed to respond rapidly to the demands of international competition and the challenges facing our nation, as the flagships for French research capable of attracting the best scientists”.
Alongside the motion of no confidence, which surpassed 10,000 signatories on 30 January, CNRS researchers protested outside the organisation’s Paris headquarters earlier this week. The umbrella body Franceuniversities expressed “deep concern and total disagreement” with the plans, stating: “Such a method, imposed by surprise and without dialogue, contravenes the fundamental principles of shared coherent scientific governance.”
Times Higher Education has contacted CNRS for comment.
Olivier Coutard, chair of the CNRS scientific board, told THE that the “negative outcomes” of the Keylabs label “would be much larger than the positive ones”.
“The plan would, in my view, increase discrimination, tensions and competition on all levels: between geographical sites, between research units on any given site, and even within research units,” he said. “I have already heard colleagues complain that their lab might not become a key lab, although obviously, they themselves were excellent, because others in their lab were less excellent.”
Branding only a quarter of laboratories with the “key” label “would brutally, arbitrarily and irreversibly marginalise approximately three-quarters of currently existing CNRS labs”, Coutard said. “What we need as a national academic community is more cooperation rather than more competition.”
CNRS researcher and archaeologist Jean-Marc Pétillon said he expected that the organisation “will try to have people directed as a priority to these key labs, while the teams without the label will just stop growing”.
“I think this would be the most dreadful consequence for these labs: becoming an ageing team that doesn’t see any fresh blood coming in,” he said.
Pointing to existing pressure on French research budgets, Pétillon commented: “I think behind this decision is the idea that we cannot afford to fund an institution like the CNRS which does a little bit of everything, so we should concentrate on a few key sectors and leave the rest.”
Thomas Perrin, a fellow CNRS archaeologist, said the laboratories that did not receive the label would be perceived as “bad labs”, adding: “They will get less and less money, and attract less and less people.”
“France doesn’t give enough money to its research programmes,” Perrin said, noting that the country has yet to meet the European Union target of investing 3 per cent of gross domestic product in research and development. The next president of the CNRS, he said, must “fight to get some more money for research”.
