Posted on behalf of Elie Gardner.

Peru’s Prime Minister Juan Jimenez last week launched a US$100 million programme to boost scientific research, technological development and innovation.

Juan Rodriguez, the director of the General Institute of Investigation at the National University of Engineering in Lima, called the announcement a “magnificent sign”.

The Innovation Project for Competitiveness will be funded by the Peruvian government ($65 million) and the Inter-American Development Bank ($35-million loan). The money will be distributed through a public bidding process that targets emerging enterprises and service providers of technology.

During the announcement on 18 December, Jimenez said that the government is making
the “most important economic contribution to science, technology and innovation” in Peru’s history. Last week the government also announced that the country will reopen its research base in Antarctica after a five-year hiatus, and in late November, it created an organization (the National Service of Environmental Certification) to carry out environmental-impact assessments.

But Peru still has a long way to go to match the investment of its neighbours: it spends only 0.15% of its gross domestic product (GDP) on research and development, compared with 0.7% in Chile and 1.1% in Brazil. Before taking office in July 2011, president Ollanta Humala set the goal of increasing the investment to 0.7% in just three years.

But Rodriguez says that money alone won’t make a difference until all of the funds are more efficiently managed and used. Between 2004 and 2011, about $650 million designated for science and technology was not spent by public universities, for example. This money comes from mining royalties, and comes with specific constraints about where it can be spent and who can use it. Rodriguez says that many of the regions receiving the money lack the know-how and experience to conduct research or build up scientific infrastructure.

Rodriguez suggests that researchers and investigators from all over the country should be allowed to compete for the funds, by proposing projects that would benefit the region where the resources come from. He says that technology developed by these projects could potentially bring electricity to isolated communities in the Andes, find medicines in plants, develop proper water management for agriculture along the coast and allow Peru to refine its own minerals instead of having to send them abroad.

Posted on behalf of Michele Catanzaro.

Are Spain's brains about to fly away like balloons? {credit}JULIAN REBOLLO/CCOO{/credit}

Researchers gathered in more than a dozen Spanish cities this morning to protest against drastic cuts to the country’s science budget. The demonstrations were organized by the Open Letter for Science group, a platform uniting the main scientific organizations in the country, including scientific societies, unions, university rectors and researchers’ associations.

In Madrid, the protesters met at the Campus of Complutense University and lofted dozens of balloons in to the air — supposedly a symbol of brains draining away from the country. With the same message in mind, scientists with suitcases queued in front of the train station in Valencia. Organizations of Spanish scientists working abroad gave support to the demonstrations from the United Kingdom and Germany.

The protesters read in public a joint document called ‘With R&D [research and development], we do have future’. The document asks for “a U-turn in the government’s science policy” and calls “all society to stop the dismantling of the research and development system”. If this policy does not change, “the damage … will be irreparable, destroying what has been built in decades of efforts, leaving thousands of young scientists without jobs … and seriously affecting the development of Spanish economy”, says the text. Representatives of Open Letter for Science delivered the document to the president of the government’s office in Madrid.

After a decade in which investments had more than doubled, the state’s budget for science has dropped by 39% since 2009 in Spain, going back to 2005 levels. The total amount of people working in R&D fell by 3.1% in 2011, according to the latest data from the National Institute of Statistics. The National Research Council experienced a liquidity crisis last July, and is now grappling with a deficit of €100 million (US$132 million). The Confederation of Spanish University Rectors issued a statement on the effects of budget cuts on universities on 10 December, the last of a series of open letters and declarations from scientific groups.

“Today, all the organizations representing science in Spain have joined to give the same message: without science, there is no future,” says Salce Elvira Gomez, secretary of research and development at the largest Spanish union, Comisiones Obreras. “In the past few years, we have tried to have a dialogue with politicians, but the government has not fulfilled its promise to have science as a priority,” says José Manuel Fernández, a postdoctoral researcher in agriculture and spokesperson for the Federation of Young Researchers. “So now we address the citizens directly: are they disposed to be disconnected from science?”

Posted on behalf of Michele Catanzaro.

Michel Barnier, Europe's Commissioner for Internal Market and Services{credit}Michel Barnier{/credit}

The European Parliament yesterday ended decades of wrangling over how to streamline the European Union (EU) patent system. On 11 December it approved an ‘EU patent package’, an agreement among 25 member states to roll out a new unitary patent that will be valid in all signatory nations and will be overseen by a single patent court.

In a statement, Europe’s commissioner for internal market and services, Michel Barnier, defined the new framework as “a one-stop shop for obtaining a patent having immediate effect in most parts of the EU’s territory”, and said that the first unitary patents are expected to be granted in April 2014.

The European Commission hopes that a unified patent will make it cheaper to protect intellectual property in the EU. Companies wishing to patent their innovations in Europe must apply separately to each country, racking up an average cost of €36,000 (US$47,000) in taxes and fees, according to the commission. That compares with about €2,000 for a patent application in the United States and €600 in China. Under the new framework, a patent issued by the European Patent Office will be automatically valid in 25 countries, and its cost is expected to drop to an average €4,725. Europe has been trying to set up such a patenting framework since the mid-1970s.

But the unified patent is not pleasing everyone. Spain and Italy have refused to sign up, miffed that the patents will only be issued in English, French or German. And some intellectual property experts have criticized the system for being far too complex.

“The current regulation represents a significant step back in terms of patent law quality,” says Thomas Jaeger, a senior research fellow at the Max Plank Institute of Intellectual Property and Competition Law in Munich, Germany. Jaeger co-authored a paper in October raising concerns about the new regulation. “The validity of the patent and its infringement depend on an overlap of national, EU, and international laws — up to four levels of patent protection — that makes the new regulation extremely complex,” he says. “Moreover, the system is imbalanced in favour of the patent holder.” For example, the unitary patent does not include the option to issue compulsory licences, a common tool in patent law that allows companies to innovate by building on the technologies detailed in rivals’ patents.

On the day before the EU patent package was approved, the large technology companies Ericsson, Nokia and BAE Systems sent open letters to European Members of Parliament, defining the proposal as “bad for European business”. Their main concern is that the system could make it too easy for litigants to challenge patents, by “using threats of pan-European injunctions to extract money from legitimate European businesses”, as one of the letters points out.

Indeed, a Nature Comment piece in 2010 by Bruno van Pottelsberghe de la Potterie, an economist at the Free University Brussels and former chief economist at the European Patent Office, argued that:

Most alarmingly, the proposed EU patent would be a third layer atop the current European and national patents. Keeping the current patent systems in parallel with the new EU patent is likely to pave the way for yet more of the abusive legal behaviour practiced by some companies. For instance, a company could file for a national patent on minor improvements to an invention, made by itself or by another firm, that has already been granted a EU patent. The extra layer could lead to a greater amount of litigation in parallel, which would hold back small technology firms and universities even more.

Jaeger and his colleagues are also concerned about the unified patent court, which will have bases in Paris, London and Munich. In March 2011, the European Court of Justice dictated that the proposed court was incompatible with Union treaties, and some believe that the unified patent court would effectively sideline the court of justice in patent disputes (see ‘Single-patent legislation hits another roadblock‘).

Posted on behalf of Michele Catanzaro.

An analysis of Spain’s draft research and development (R&D) budget for 2013 has shown that the government plans to cut its investment in science by 7.21%. This is the fourth annual cut to science funding in a row: support was reduced by 4% in 2010, 7% in 2011 and 25.5% in 2012.

The draft budget was presented to Spain’s parliament on Saturday, 29 September, and allocated €5.9 billion (US$7.9 billion) to science, a €461-million reduction on the previous year’s tally. The majority of the cut (€394 million) is absorbed by military research, with civil research being reduced by just 1.2%, according to preliminary accounting by the Confederation of Spanish Scientific Societies (COSCE).

But “these figures are the result of an accounting trick”, says COSCE president Carlos Andradas, a mathematician at the Complutense University of Madrid. The small reduction to civil research funding hides a 14% cut to research grants, balanced in part by an 8.5% increase to loans offered to companies that engage in R&D.

COSCE showed in a study last week, however, that almost half of last year’s loan funds remained unspent.

The budget is set to be debated by parliament, and its final form should be approved before the end of the year. However, given that the governing right-wing People’s Party has an outright majority, it is probable that — as in 2012 — the final budget will be almost identical to the draft.