Posted on behalf of Barbara Casassus, Paris

Protesters set off on a three-week march towards Paris on Friday.{credit}Sciences en Marche{/credit}

Travelling by foot, bicycle or kayak, more than 3,000 scientists, support staff and members of the public from across France set off on Friday on a three-week march in defence of scientific research and higher education. The organizers say it is the biggest protest of its kind for 10 years.

The idea of the march was floated at the Montpellier University in June, following discussions about employment and job prospects for young researchers at a meeting of the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). “We realised we needed to bring together the whole scientific community – labs, universities, all disciplines, and all categories of staff,” says Patrick Lemaire, Montpellier University research biologist and president of the campaign group organizing the protest march, Sciences en Marche.

The protesters will arrive in Paris on 17 October, congregating in front of the country’s National Assembly. Their demands include a €10-billion plan to recruit an extra 3,000 agency and university research and support staff per year over the next decade. The protesters also want an overall budget increase of €20 billion or 8% over the same period, with a focus on recurrent spending for labs, and recognition of doctorates in collective bargaining agreements (contracts detailing duties and working conditions for employers and employees) with measures to promote PhD recruitment by businesses and the senior civil service.

The demands are unlikely to be met, as the French government has no room for manoeuvre on the cash front in the face of a stagnating economy. Not only has it been unable to rein in massive deficits, it is also asking the European Commission and Germany for a two-year delay to comply with an EU deficit limit of 3% of gross domestic product (GDP).

The aim also is to convince parliament to overhaul the research tax credit (Crédit d’Impôt Recherche, CIR) in the 2015 budget, a draft of which will be adopted by the cabinet on Wednesday together with a public finance plan for 2014-2019. The tax break will cost the state about €6 billion this year, and is criticized for benefitting big business rather than smaller, younger enterprises, and not producing the expected return. “It is also not targeted, which shows the government has no industrial strategy or policy,” says Lemaire.

The march coincides with a three-week annual government-sponsored Science Festival, and supporters include more than 110 labs, 350 CNRS lab directors, 10 universities, and several eminent scientists, including 2011 Nobel Prize winner Jules Hoffmann. Most of the 3,000 or so supporters have promised to join the march for at least part of the journey.

France’s Secretary of State for Higher Education and Research has met with a number of disgruntled researchers to hear their complaints and offer reassurance, to little avail. But France is not alone – there is also disquiet among researchers elsewhere in Europe. In Italy, scientists researchers are organizing a demonstration in Rome on 18 October, according to the online EuroScientist, and Let’s Save Research demonstrations continue to be staged in Spain.

The French scientific community largely supported the socialist government when it took office in 2012 and participated in national consultations about which recent reforms should be kept or dropped. But the honeymoon did not last long. “It became clear very quickly that the government has no courage and no vision for the future of science and higher education in France,” Lemaire told Nature yesterday. Moreover, the fact that higher education and research was demoted to a junior ministry when Prime Minister Manuel Valls took office in April “shows symbolically that the portfolio is a low priority for this government,” Lemaire adds.

Posted on behalf of Nuño Domínguez.

MADRID — The Spanish government has delayed the award of prestigious scientific grant programmes and unexpectedly reduced travel grants even as young scientists were leaving for short stays at laboratories abroad. The move has raised fears among junior and senior scientists that this could be another cut to the already battered science budget, which has gone through four years of continued reductions.

At stake are 940 positions for scientists and lab technicians with a total spending of €104 million (US$136 million). The programmes would provide labour and equipment funding for researchers at universities and research centres across Spain for a period of up to five years. The government was supposed to issue a final list of grantee recipients in late April, following a decision period of six months, but on 12 April the secretary of state for research, development and innovation unexpectedly extended the decision period for six more months.

Among the four nation-wide programmes that have been delayed is the Ramón y Cajal tenure-track system, created in 2001 to attract and retain top Spanish and foreign talent. The programme suffered delays in 2011, and a hiring freeze imposed last year is also severely reducing the chances for those finishing their five-year grant period to land a permanent position. The government says that the delay is due to the unusual number of grantee applications received, which it says went up by 4%.

“The delay means it is going to be two years since the last time scientists were awarded these grants,” says Carlos Andradas, the president of the Confederation of Spanish Scientific Societies (COSCE).

The government’s decision comes amid severe delays and cuts across the country’s main scientific programmes. The science budget has been cut by 7.2% in 2013 and 25.5 % in 2012, and has accumulated a 38% reduction since 2009, according to COSCE. “It will be inevitable that the scientists competing for these grants would pursue other opportunities abroad if they have the option,” says Andradas.

“We only expect to issue a provisional Ramón y Cajal grantee list after the summer,” a spokesperson for the state secretary for research says. The other three programmes are expected to be awarded “before summer”, he says.

The government is also postponing its final word on other grants funding travel and stays abroad for young scientists.This programme will award €6.7 million in grants for researchers to complete experiments for their PhD work in other countries. In a meeting with junior and senior scientists yesterday in Madrid, science secretary Carmen Vela said that she hopes the grants would be awarded “in two weeks”.

But because grants cannot reimburse travel expenses that have already occurred, the delay would mean the programme’s overall budget will be “slashed by an additional  8%”, says Roberto Díez, a PhD scientist at the Centro de Investigaciones Biológicas in Madrid, who attended the meeting. “Last time they contacted us they also said it was going to be two weeks, so this is already a month delay,” says Díez.

The research secretary’s spokesperson says the 8% cut is due to grant application review by ANEP, a national agency supervising public-funded research projects.

Sweeping US budget cuts set to begin in 2013 would reduce federal research and development funds by $57.5 billion over the next five years, according to a report released on 27 September by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) based in Washington, DC.

Known as a ‘sequester’, the across-the-board cut would come into effect on 2 January, unless Congress can agree on an alternative budget plan to lower the federal deficit. But with lawmakers adjourned until after the US presidential election in November, no immediate action appears likely to forestall the 8-10% budget reductions that were enacted last year in order to cut $1.2 trillion from the federal budget over the next decade.

“Sequestration is really a long-term challenge,” said Matt Hourihan, director of the AAAS R&D Budget and Policy Program, in a teleconference.

Hourihan’s analysis tracks expected science and health spending under sequestration for the next five years, building on 2013 projections released earlier by the Office of Management and Budget.

By 2017, the AAAS report estimates that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) would lose $11.3 billion or 7.6% in research and development funding. Sequestration would cost the National Science Foundation (NSF) $2.1 billion, and quash research and development funding for NASA to levels not seen since the 1980s, said Hourihan. A selection of projected cuts spanning the next five years can be found here.

“The dollars drained from the research pipeline would knock the wind out of US innovation at the very moment that it is most needed to refuel the economy,” said Mary Woolley, president of the Virginia-based research advocacy group Research!America in a recent statement.

“Our pre-eminence in science is being threatened,” said AAAS chief executive Alan Leshner during the teleconference. He noted that US investments in research and development are flagging as those of China and other countries are rapidly increasing. Furthermore, cuts to funding agencies such as the NIH ”will send a very bad message to younger potential scientists,” who often depend on research grants to establish their careers, said Leshner.

At the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, sequestration would slash at least $50-60 million in annual support, according to senior vice provost for research Steven Fluharty, who also participated in the teleconference. According to the university’s estimates, every $1 million cut would cost 23-27 jobs there. Fluharty said the damage to new and developing University of Pennsylvania programs would be “possibly irreparable.”

Pennsylvania ranks ninth among state research dollars lost under sequestration, according to the AAAS report. California, Maryland, and Virginia top the list as the hardest-hit states.

While the current plan balances cuts between defense and non-defense programs, science and health agencies could suffer even greater setbacks, depending on who holds the upper hand in Congress and the White House after the November election. In March, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed a budget resolution that could shift the burden of the sequester onto non-defense programs in order to maintain US military spending.

“Cuts of this scale would push most agency budgets back by at least a decade,” projected Hourihan.

As the largest funder of non-defense research and development, the NIH would lose $26.1 billion or 17.5% of its funding, if sequestration cuts were applied only to non-defense funds. Hourihan found that the NSF could lose $4.9 billion through 2017 under the House sequestration proposal.

Although the House budget resolution was defeated in the Senate, Hourihan said similar proposals have emerged before and may again in the future. He called passage of such a bill unlikely, but “enough of a possibility that it’s worth the scientific community be aware of.”