'Research must be freed from ministries'

Danish research should be made more independent of the government, a report says.

Institutes carrying out ministry-funded research should also contribute more to higher education and training, it says.

The report by the Danish Council for Research Policy for the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation says that the 25 research institutes reviewed are "an important and indispensable part of Danish research".

This year, the institutes will receive DKr 1.26 billion (£106 million) from public funds, 14 per cent of Denmark's total research funding. They educate about 15 per cent of the country's PhD students and 4 per cent of masters students.

More than 90 per cent of the scientific personnel are in the technical, natural, health or agricultural sciences. The council recommends giving the research institutes boards of governors with little or no connection to the relevant ministry to ensure independence.

Research institutes' contribution to higher education and researcher training should be formalised in binding agreements with the universities. But the extent and character of their educational commitment at bachelor, masters and PhD level should be described in a more detailed assessment, the report says.

For example, the Danish Meteorological Institute contributes very little to the training of meteorologists, which is carried out exclusively by a small group of researchers at Copenhagen University, and its resources could be more closely integrated with higher education.

Professorships at research institutes should be established in close collaboration with relevant university departments. Universities should then be able to use these professors for teaching, the council says in its report.

The council also proposes a new centre for space research, associated with a university in the Copenhagen area, to amalgamate the activities of the Danish Space Research Institute with the space-related research of the Danish Meteorological Institute, Copenhagen University and the Technical University of Denmark.

There should be greater coherence between the research carried out by the Risø National Laboratory and the technological and natural science research activities of Copenhagen University and the Technical University of Denmark, the report says.