Development of Current Research Information Systems in Finland

Transcription

1 Development of Current Research Information Systems in Finland Laitinen, Sauli; Sutela Pirjo & Tirronen, Kerttu VTT Information Service PO Box 2000 FIN VTT Finland Abstract An account is given on the structure and volume of public and private research activities in Finland compared with other countries andl on the development of information services related to ongoing research projects as well as dissemination of information on the research results in Finland. 1 Research and development activities in the European Economic Area In spite of the fact that the development of R&D expenditure in the European Economic Area has been declining (Figure 1) there is a lot of interest in investing in research and development, which is one of the driving forces of economic growth. 3 2,8 2,6 2,4 EEA US JP 2,2 2 1, Figure 1. Development of R&D Expenditure as % of GDP The investment in research and development varies from country by country both as to the volume compared with GDP and as to the share between public and private sector (see Figure 2).

2 JAPAN UNITED STATES EU UNITED KINGDOM SWEDEN FINLAND PORTUGAL AUSTRIA NETHERLANDS ITALY IRELAND FRANCE SPAIN GREECE GERMANY DENMARK BELGIUM 0,65 % 0,61 % 0,66 % 1,14 % 0,63 % 1,22 % 0,97 % 0,94 % 0,42 % 0,15 % 0,65 % 0,83 % 0,94 % 1,15 % 0,48 % 0,56 % 0,38 % 1,05 % 0,81 % 1,37 % 0,43 % 0,43 0,38 % 0,11 % 0,75 % 1,57 % 0,70 % 1,19 % 0,49 % 1,07 % 2,10 % 2,08 % 1,98 % 2,88 % Public Private 0,00 % 0,50 % 1,00 % 1,50 % 2,00 % 2,50 % 3,00 % 3,50 % Figure 2. R&D expenditure in the public and private sector as % of GDP in 1999 (Source Research DG of the European Commission, COM (2000) 6) 2 Scientific and technical research in Finland Regardless of the EEA trend development of investments in scientific and technical research in Finland has been very favourable in the recent years. A ratio between private and public investment in R&D was 68:32 in The government decided in 1996 to increase state funding for research so that the GDP share of R&D expenditure would rise to 2.9 per cent per annum by the year With private-sector R&D expenditure growing even faster than that of the public sector, preliminary data suggest that Finland has already exceeded the three per cent level. At the same time the share of the private sector in total R&D expenditure has risen to 70 per cent. The development of spending in R&D in Finland is shown in Figure 3. Mmk % 3, ,00 2,50 2,00 1,50 1,00 0,50 University sector Public sector Business sector % of GDP ,00 Figure 3. Development of R&D expenditure in Finland as % of GDP (Source Statistics Finland, Science and Technology 1999:5)

3 Organisation of the public research sector in Finland is presented in Figure 4. Parliament Science and Technology Policy Council Ministry of Education Department for Education and Sc. Pol. Other Departments Council of State Ministry of Trade and Industry Technology Department Other Departments Other Ministries Academy of Finland National Technology Agency(Tekes) Sitra Universities (20) Research establishments Research establishments Research establishments Figure 4. Organisation of the public research sector in Finland. The Science and Technology Policy Council of Finland, chaired by the Prime Minister, advises the government and its ministries in questions relating to science and technology. The Council is responsible for the strategic development and co-ordination of Finnish science and technology policy as well as of the national innovation system as a whole. The membership consists of seven other Ministers and ten other members well versed in science and technology. The main responsibility of the Ministry of Education in science policy is to promote the development of basic research and its infrastructure (e.g. equipment, data network, scientific computing and libraries). In the administrative field of the Ministry of Education are all the universities (20) and the Academy of Finland, which is the Finnish research council organisation. Universities perform about 20% of Finnish research and development. The Research Institute for the Languages of Finland is also subordinated to the Ministry of Education. The Academy of Finland is the central financing and planning body in basic research. The majority of Academy funding is channelled to basic research conducted in universities. The 29 polytechnics also carry out R&D relevant to their teaching and to the world of work. The Ministry of Trade and Industry is responsible for Finland s industrial and technology policy and for the creation of preconditions for the development of Finnish industry and enterprise. Other important fields of responsibility are technical inspection, international technological and economic co-operation, and energy policy. The Ministry also contributes towards the establishing and growth of small and medium-sized companies, the safeguarding of profitable business activities, and the promotion of competitiveness. Technology policy is one of the focal areas in the Ministry of Trade and Industry. The aim of technology policy is to boost the technological level of Finland s private sector - both service and industrial enterprises - and to improve its international competitiveness. Tekes, the National Technology Agency of Finland, is the main organisation for financing applied and industrial R&D in Finland. Tekes supports applied and industrial R&D with about two billion Finnish marks annually. The funds are awarded from state budget. Tekes

4 offers channels for co-operation with Finnish companies, universities and research institutes. Tekes technology programmes aim at gaining new technology expertise and product development options in the important business areas for the future. The programmes also offer good frameworks for international R&D co-operation. Currently there are 65 extensive national technology programmes. In 1999 Tekes provided FIM 1100 million to financing technology programmes. Tekes co-ordinates and offers financial support for participation in international technology initiatives including EU research programmes. Sitra, the Finnish National Fund for Research and Development, is an independent, neutral public fund answered for by the Finnish Parliament. Sitra's operations are mainly financed through income from endowment investment and project finance. Several sectoral ministries are responsible for research serving their sectors. The Ministry of Agriculture is responsible for the Agricultural Research Centre, Agricultural Economics Research Institute, Game and Fisheries Research Institute, Forest Research Institute and the National Veterinary and Food Research Institute. The Finnish Environment Agency is subordinated to the Ministry of the Environment. The Ministry of Social Affairs and Health is responsible for the Centre for Radiation and Nuclear Safety, National Public Health Institute and Institute for Occupational Health and National Research Centre for Welfare and Health. The Finnish transport research is mainly financed by the Ministry of Transport and Communications and agencies within its purview. The Ministry is also a financier of research related to telecommunications, mass media, internet and new services and information networks. The Finnish Institute of Marine Research is subordinated to the Ministry of Transport. There are three research institutes under the Ministry and Trade Industry: National Consumer Research Centre, Geological Survey and the Technical Research Centre of Finland. Technical Research Centre of Finland, VTT is one of the largest research establishments in the Nordic countries with 3000 employees and research in most fields of technology. The fields of research include electronics, information technology, automation, chemical technology, biotechnology, energy technology, manufacturing technology, building technology as well as technology for communities and infrastructure. Research by the private sector is performed in their own research departments or contracted to domestic and foreign research establishments. In addition pulp and paper companies have a common research establishment, the Finnish Pulp and Paper Research Institute, which serves not only its owner companies but also other clients for research and development. 3 Development of information services related to ongoing research projects in Finland Major industrial research departments have their systems for managing research projects and documentation of research results for internal use. Public financing organisations also keep track of the projects, which they support. Owing to confidential nature of this kind of

5 information the systems are mainly for internal use only. Statistical information as well as general descriptions of research programmes and results achieved in these programmes may be made publicly available. Public research establishments, including research centres and universities, however, are more interested in informing about their projects already in the start-up phase. Financing organisations have also supported the idea for establishing common, unified information systems for ongoing research by the research establishments. The importance of information systems for current research was realised in Finland as early as in early seventies. Technical Research Centre of Finland, VTT made a feasibility study on a computerised research register for its use. On the basis of the feasibility study the Ministry of Finance decided to cover the costs of the realisation of the research register as a model for a national information system for current research. In addition a committee was set up by the Government in 1974 to make a general plan for a nation-wide research register. In spite of the recommendations of the committee and great interest expressed by a number of other research establishments including universities, the VTT research register remained as the only information system of the kind for a number of years. Later on also other research institutes as well as financing organisations established information systems for current research. A survey made in 1987 revealed 40 research registers in operation and 35 under construction. Almost all of the systems were for the internal use of the organisation only. In 1989 a project was started for creating a centralised research register of all 20 universities in Finland. However, it became obvious that this kind of a system is not feasible in practice and the project was cancelled. In stead the Ministry of Education set up in 1992 an advisory group for universities for helping them to establish separate systems with unified structure. Recommendations by the working group were published in 1994: No national register was endorsed, universities are free to build registers according to their own needs. The report includes recommendations for the content and data elements as well as for the use of SGML. Many universities have set up comprehensive databases of current research. These systems have become very important as the principle of management-by-results has been introduced at the universities. In addition to the databases of universities and research institutes, information on current projects is also collected on subject bases from different organisations for a common database in the field. Such databases as Forest Cluster database by Finnish Forest Industries Federation, Educational Research in Finland database (KOTU) by the National Board of Education and other information systems of several research programs containing information on research projects are examples of that kind. The proliferation of the Internet and the www has given new impetus also to current research information systems. According to Internet statistics Finland is one of leading countries as to the number of Internet hosts in the count per capita. So, it is not a surprise that all public research institutes and universities have www pages describing their research activities in many ways. A list of public research organisations in Finland with www address of their current research information services on the Internet (if available) is given in Table 1.

6 Table 1. Public research organisations in Finland and their current research information systems on the Internet Organisation Parent Organisation WWW-Address (of the CRIS, if available) Agricultural Economics Research Institute Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry Agricultural Research Centre Finland Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry Finnish Forest Research Institute Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry Finnish Game and Fisheries Research Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry Institute National Veterinary and Food Research Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry Institute Arctic Centre Ministry of Education Finnish Research Centre for Domestic Ministry of Education Languages Helsinki School of Economics and Ministry of Education Business Administration Helsinki University of Technology Ministry of Education Lappeenranta University of Technology Ministry of Education Swedish School of Economics and Ministry of Education Business Administration Tampere University of Technology Ministry of Education Turku School of Economics and Business Administration Ministry of Education p University of Art and Design Helsinki Ministry of Education University of Helsinki Ministry of Education University of Joensuu Ministry of Education University of Jyväskylä Ministry of Education University of Kuopio Ministry of Education University of Lapland Ministry of Education University of Oulu Ministry of Education University of Tampere Ministry of Education University of Turku Ministry of Education University of Vaasa Ministry of Education Åbo Akademi University Ministry of Education Finnish Environment Agency Ministry of Environment Government Institute for Economic Ministry of Finance Research National Research Institute of Legal Ministry of Justice Policy Finnish Centre for Radiation and Nuclear Ministry of Social Affairs and Health Safety Finnish Institute of Occupational Health Ministry of Social Affairs and Health National Public Health Institute Ministry of Social Affairs and Health National Research Centre for Welfare and Ministry of Social Affairs and Health Health Geological Survey of Finland Ministry of Trade and Industry National Consumer Research Centre Ministry of Trade and Industry mus/tutkimus.html Technical Research Centre of Finland Ministry of Trade and Industry Finnish Institute of Marine Research Ministry of Transport and Communications Finnish Meteorological Institute Ministry of Transport and Communications The Finnish Pulp and Paper Research Institute Private, pulp and paper industry The shape and characteristics of the information given varies to great extent. All of the research establishments have a general description of their activities, in addition there is a description of research performed, at least on the programme level. Some of the organisations give a list of major research projects on www pages only. Half of the organisations have a traditional database, where information is structured in fields and searches can be made according to different search criteria. The adb systems used for the registers include standard database management systems such as Oracle and traditional information retrieval systems for textual information. A popular system for research registers in Finnish organisations is TRIP, which was originally developed at the library of the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden and which has been an established, commercially available system for a number of years.

7 The CERIF standard has not been fully implemented in any of the systems, however, it has been taken into consideration in the realisation of the larger systems. Some of the small services based on www pages only rely on Internet search engines for finding specific information on the search projects. Two of Finnish organisations, Helsinki University of Technology and Technical Research Centre of Finland contribute presently to ERGO, the project for common research register in EU countries. The current status of the research register of the Technical Research Centre of Finland, the oldest research register in the country is the following: The register contains descriptions of 6300 public research projects carried out since Information to the research register is obtained from the internal administrative system on projects which have been classified as public and which satisfy a criteria for size. Information is transferred to the research register, which is maintained by the information retrieval system TRIP. Information retrieval is offered to users by a user-friendly formbased interface, which also include use of sophisticated search options combining information in different fields by using Boolean operators. In addition a command based interface is used internally for more complex search tasks. The search system is available as a separate service on the www pages of the VTT Information Service. In addition the research register has been linked to pages describing the activities of the nine research institutes of VTT. Some of the research institutes have implemented the service so that when a user is interested in the current research and clicks the corresponding link a search is automatically made in the research register and the list of projects of that particular research institute is retrieved. The implementation of this feature has increased the usage of the research register considerably. Usage statistics show that 80% of the use comes from outside organisations, industrial enterprises, universities and polytechnics. There are several options in displaying the search results. Links for additional information are also provided. These include publications and more detailed descriptions of the project on www pages when available. There is also a link to the author by electronic mail service. 4 Publishing of research results For publishing of research results international forums are preferred. Research results are presented in conferences and published as articles in international scholarly journals, books etc. There is also domestic scholarly publishing, which is quite fragmented. In addition to commercial publishers, universities and learned societies carry a responsibility for publishing activity. Doctoral dissertations published yearly total about 800. Monograph series are also frequently published by the universities. Finland has more than 200 learned societies, which publish over one hundred journals. For report literature there are local publication series maintained by university departments and research establishments. Quality control in the form of peer reviewing of these report series varies. It may also happen that many of these reports remain as grey literature known only to a small number of potential users. Some of the publishers take effort in sending the reports to international abstracting and indexing services in order to make them known to users of scientific research results. Electronic publishing of research results is increasing. Researchers especially at universities maintain their personal home pages on the Internet and may include their papers on servers. Some of the research establishments also offer selected reports on the

8 Internet as parallel electronic publications. Descriptions of current research projects also may provide access to publications. Electronic access to publication series of Finnish learned societies was developed in a project, ELEKTRA, which is being financed by the Ministry of Education. Access to doctoral dissertations is also provided by some universities. 5 Discussion and conclusions Dissemination of information on current research is important in the internationalisation of research and in networking of scientists. The appreciation of information systems, however, varies among different parties involved. Some researchers are reluctant in giving information on their projects at an early state. Maintaining a database of current information requires effort from researches during the whole project so increasing their workload. Some researches consider that a description of a project on www pages is enough for dissemination purposes. They also believe that their personal contacts to the colleagues offer sufficient means for finding partners for new research projects. So, generally registers of ongoing research are not greatly appreciated by researchers. Administrative and financial management of projects is done by internal cost accounting systems. It has not been easy to combine the needs for project management to the need for information dissemination and retrieval. So, in many cases two different systems have to be maintained increasing the amount of work. Traditional bibliographic databases are still the most important source of information of published research results. Lack of standardised databases for current research has mostly been perceived by professional information specialists in their work in chasing up information for their clients for various purposes. Description of research projects on www pages only is not sufficient in satisfying varying information needs for current research. Use of Internet search engines produce results of varying quality. So, a structured database for ongoing research projects is needed. Wwwbased user interfaces on the Internet offer a user-friendly way for making searches in these databases. Linking the search results to other information available on the project such as publications and multimedia presentations on the Internet offer a modern tool for information dissemination and retrieval making publicly funded research accessible by other researchers, industry and other potential users for the benefit of the entire society. References Communication from the Commission to the Council, the European Parliament, the Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions, Towards a European Research Area, COM (2000) 6, Brussels, [includes statistics by Eurostat used for Figures 1 and 2] Tutkimus- ja kehittämistoiminta Suomessa1998, Tiede ja teknologia 1999:2, Tilastokeskus, Helsinki, 1999 [Science and Technology, Official Statistics of Finland, Statistics Finland] Innovation in Finland. Available at < [referenced ]

9 Korkeakoulujen tutkimustietokantojen seurantaryhmän loppuraportti [Final report of the working group for follow-up of research databases for institutes of higher learning], Opetusministeriön työryhmien muistioita 5:1994 Yliopistopaino, Helsinki CERIF: the Common European Research Information Format. Available at <URL: [referenced ] Salonharju, Inkeri, Elektra - Network access to scientific journal articles. Available at <URL: [referenced ]