The EU Had a Scientific Collaboration Problem Long Before Brexit

With the United Kingdom's decision to leave the European Union already appearing to have a negative impact on its scientists, you wouldn't be blamed for thinking any further breakup of the EU would be disastrous for continental scientific collaboration.

But a new report has found just the opposite. As the European Union grew in 2004 and again in 2007, with the acceptance of new member states, cross-country research collaboration didn't actually see an uptick. Instead, it declined, according to a new study in open-access journal Science Advances.

"In 2004, the EU expanded from 15 to 25 countries corresponding to roughly a 20 percent increase in its population and an 11 percent increase in the population of researchers in R&D," said Alexander M. Petersen, assistant professor at the Ernest and Julio Management Program School of Engineering, University of California, in a media call to journalists. "We pinpointed an interesting mechanism accompanying the enlargement that would explain stagnation of the development of European research."

Petersen and his colleagues behind the new report, 'Quantifying the negative impact of brain drain on the integration of European science', argue that because higher impact research is more likely to occur in collaborations across more than once country, migration imbalance as a result of EU expansion negatively affected the convergence of scientific competitiveness across the whole of Europe.

Instead of boosting cross-country collaboration, an east-to-west "brain drain" affecting new countries joining the EU, such as Poland in 2004, saw academics upping sticks and moving to be with their new neighbours, thus erasing any previously established cross-border links between their home country and their destination country. This migration imbalance is in turn causing eastern European countries to suffer scientifically as top academics move away to countries like the UK, Belgium, and Germany.

The authors combed millions of research papers published between 1996 and 2012 for collaborations between researchers in different countries. They also analyzed data on government investments and migration. The researchers found that the 2004 and 2007 EU expansions, where a total of 12 new countries were integrated, both negatively impacted cross-border research collaboration.

The report argues that its results challenge "central tenets" underlying the EU science collaboration group's European Research Area integration policies; policies that urge that unifying labor markets will increase the group's international competitiveness.

"It is important for EU policy-makers to consider the possible unintended consequences of labor market integration, especially considering the EU goals for a unified industrial and academic R&D innovation system," said the researchers. "When a researcher not only moves abroad but also brings his or her international links along, this represents a loss of social capital—in addition to human capital and tacit knowledge—that may further reduce the potential for knowledge spillovers across countries."

However, with 2016's Brexit vote, the researchers have yet to analyze how the decrease in size of the European Union would affect cross-border collaboration.

Brexit [will] be interesting because "the UK is a hub, really, for gaining and attracting international, high skilled labor and some of the best scientists," said Petersen.

"To some extent, it [will] allow us to see what happens when not only is there exit of a country from the European Union but actually a very prestigious exit."

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