A Joint Research Action Plan for the Arqus Alliance

On 14th March 2022 Vice-Rectors and other senior research policy-makers of Arqus universities were coming together to give their final touches to the proposal of Joint Research Action Plan for the Arqus Alliance. This document details a shared research and innovation strategy for the partner universities and will be approved by the Rectors’ Council, the highest governing body of the Alliance, at the Arqus Annual Conference in Padua in April 2022.

In the framework of the Arqus Research and Innovation project, partner universities have brought together in a strategic document all aspects related to their cooperation in matters of research and innovation, such as sharing top-end infrastructures, joint support of young researchers and increasing the number of joint research projects in areas such as Artificial Intelligence, Climate Change and European Heritage.

The Joint Research Action Plan (JRAP) intends to complement the individual research action plans of the Arqus universities, setting the institutional framework conditions that “enable” researchers to intensify bottom-up collaborations and project initiatives with their counterparts within Arqus and globally: seed funding, mobility funding, networking workshops, policy decisions, support policies, etc. Another essential aspect is inter-institutional bench-learning, the process by which Arqus universities want to learn from each other’s best practices.

Transformational excellence is the guiding principle of this plan, as universities are, on the one hand, actors of societal transformations through research that has an impact on society and influences societal decision-making processes. And on the other, actors of internal transformations with the aim of adapting the university to the changes in society and in the world of research, such as the reform of research career assessment and the unstoppable development of Open Science.

The final green light for this first version of the JRAP will be given by the Rectors’ Council at the Arqus Annual Conference in Padua, from 4th to 7th April 2022. The plan will then be deployed until May 2023, when its impact will be assessed and a revised version of the Joint Research Action Plan will be approved.

News prepared by Luisa Bernstorff, project officer of the Arqus Research and Innovation project.