scholarly collaboration between europe and israel: a scientometric examination of a changing...

Jointly published by Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest Scientometrics, Vol. 78, No. 3 (2009) 427–446 and Springer, Dordrecht DOI: 10.1007/s11192-007-2044-x

Received January 10, 2008

Address for correspondence: ERIC ZIMMERMAN E-mail: [email protected] 0138–9130/US $ 20.00 Copyright © 2008 Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest All rights reserved

Scholarly collaboration between Europe and Israel: A scientometric examination of a changing landscape

ERIC ZIMMERMAN,a WOLFGANG GLÄNZEL,b JUDIT BAR-ILANc

a Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya (IDC), P.O. Box 167 Herzliya 46150 Israel b Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Steunpunt O&O Indicatoren, Dept. MSI, Leuven, Belgium

c Department of Information Science, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, 52900 Israel

In this paper we examine various aspects of the scientific collaboration between Europe and Israel, and show that the traditional collaboration patterns of Israel (preference towards collaboration with the US) is changing, and the collaboration with the EU countries is growing.

Introduction

The international orientation of Israeli research and development is changing. Until recently the United States has been the major foreign supporter of science in Israel. Recently, however, other international players have entered the field – notably the European Union through the Research Framework Programme (FP),1 altering the Israeli S&T landscape – creating new alliances.

There is evidence of a decrease in USA federal funding levels vis-à-vis Israeli basic research. We argue that this funding decrease, combined with Israeli’s entry into the European Union Research Framework Programme signals a shift in Israel’s orientation away from The United States. Empirical evidence from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) based on co-authorship

1 Israel has been an associate Member state of the Framework Programme since mid-way through the FP4; and is now in FP7.

ZIMMERMAN & AL.: Scholarly collaboration between Europe and Israel

428 Scientometrics 78 (2009)

trends support this assertion [GLÄNZEL & AL., 2007B]. It is our belief that Europe will soon reach parity (if not surpass) the USA both in the funding of research and in scientific collaboration with Israel.

With regard to article authorship statistics, the percent of papers published by Israeli researchers with non-Israeli partners which are co-authored with US researchers has indeed gone down. According to the calculations prepared for The United States-Israel Educational Foundation (USIEF) by Gideon Czapski of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (HUJI)2 on the basis of the SCI data base, US coauthored articles accounted for 68.2% of all internationally coauthored articles in 1986, but only 53.6% in 1999.3 Our observations have confirmed the continuation of this trend for the new millennium, as well. Additionally, there has been a decline in the overall percent of the total world output of scientific articles with US involvement. According to a recent study on global changes in the scientific landscape of the world [GLÄNZEL & AL., 2008] while US participation was indicated in 35.6% of all articles published in 1991, it declined to 30.4% in 2005.

The decline in the relative prominence of the US as a scientific partner for Israel as measured by article co-authorship may be linked to a decline in the relative prominence of the US in world science overall [LEYDESDORFF & WAGNER, 2007]. Taking into account both that the EU154 also is losing its share of the world total since around 2000, mirroring the relative decline of the USA and Japan [GLÄNZEL & AL., 2007A], and that the intensification of EU-Israel co-operation has continued after 1998, this global trend cannot explain all aspects of the evolution of bilateral relations. Thus, the ‘weight’ of the US might be lessening because the ‘weight’ of others like China, Brazil, Taiwan, Korea, India and Turkey is rising, but this phenomenon presently holds to a lesser extent for the EU, too [ZHOU & LEYDESDORFF, 2006; GLÄNZEL & AL., 2008]. The drop in the U.S. share of international co-authored journal publications is a well-known, long-term phenomenon which has recently been studied by GLÄNZEL & AL. [2007A].

The emergence of the European Commission’s research, training and development Framework Programmes (FP) has resulted in greater cooperation between European countries among themselves and with others. The FP fosters and environment of networking; access to new technologies, know-how and markets; new funding opportunities, exposure to new ideas; and, no less importantly for Israel, the FP gives legitimacy to Israeli academia and science. The increase in collaboration has been documented in recent European studies (e.g., [REIST-2, 1997; REIST-3, 2003]).

In the present study we summarize recent research, describing the shifting orientation of Israeli science towards Europe. This change can be measured by

2 http://chem.ch.huji.ac.il/employee/czapski/iczapski.htm 3 Presented at a Fulbright Israel workshop, Herzliya, 2005. 4 Austria, Belgium, Denmark, England, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Sweden.


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increasing funding opportunities and grant amounts, growing co-authorships, rising numbers of technology transfer agreements, and patents registered in Europe. For this analysis we will use data from varied sources, including the Office of the Chief Scientist (Israeli Ministry of Industry and Trade5) and longitudinal data sets, spanning two decades, and refer to the observations made by GLÄNZEL & AL. [2007B].

We also analyze the co-authorship network of Israel in 1991 and 2005, and discuss the Israeli culture/model of research and innovation financing (e.g. entrepreneurship, venture capital and Office of the Chief Scientist programs) and how this might serve as a model for Europe, given the Lisbon Agenda aimed at promoting economic growth, fostering competitiveness and stimulating job creation. The Lisbon Agenda foresaw European countries spending 3% of their GDP on R&D, by 2010. This will not be reached. Already, for some time, however, Israel is placed above the 4% mark.

Data sources

Most of the publication-related data are based on bibliographic data extracted from the annual volumes of the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) of Thomson Scientific (Philadelphia, PA, USA). The Science Citation Index Expanded, which is part of the Web of Science, indexes approximately 6000 of the world’s leading scientific journals in the life sciences, natural sciences, mathematics and engineering. The multidisciplinary database has unique features that allow its use for bibliometric purposes.

We have only taken into consideration original research documents, that is, document types articles, letters, notes and reviews. Publications were assigned to countries on the basis of their corporate addresses which appear in the by-line of the publication. All countries indicated in the address field were considered thus allowing for the analysis of international co-authorship as well. Citations received by these papers have been counted for a three-year citation window beginning with the publication year on the basis of an item-by-item procedure using special identification-keys made up of bibliographic components.

In this study a full-counting scheme was applied; a full count was recorded whenever a country occurred in the corporate address field (cf. [REIST-2, 1997]). Of course, duplicate entries have been removed. Because of the extensive presence of international co-authorship, national bibliometric indicators such as publication or citation counts based on this full-counting scheme are not additive; they cannot be summed up over countries to regions or supra-national units. Consequently, a share of x% of a given country in the world’s total publication output means that x% all papers have one or more co-authors with an address in this country. The most intelligible

5 The exact name of the ministry changes periodically, as a result of government coalition agreements.



approach to the analysis of international co-authorship patterns is splitting corporate addresses into country and region pairs. For instance, an Israeli co-publication with co-authors from the US, France and Germany is consequently counted as one link each with the US and the EU15.

As for subject classification, publications were arranged into 12 major fields: Agriculture & Environment (AGRI), Biology (BIOL), Biosciences (BIOS), Biomedical research (BIOM), Clinical & Experimental Medicine I – General & Internal Medicine (CLI1), Clinical & Experimental Medicine II – Non-Internal Medicine Specialties (CLI2), Neuroscience & Behavior (NEUR), Chemistry (CHEM), Physics (PHYS), Geosciences & Space Sciences (GEOS), Engineering (ENGN) and Mathematics (MATH). This classification scheme was developed by GLÄNZEL & SCHUBERT [2003] on the basis of the ISI Subject Categories for journals. The detailed assignment of subfields to major fields can be found in the afore-mentioned paper.

The Israeli R&D climate

Small in size and population (about 7 million), lacking natural resources and burdened by imposing defense needs, Israel has nonetheless come a long way since the establishment of the State in 1948. Since 1950 Israel has witnessed an almost fivefold growth in its population and in its per capita GDP in real terms. No explanation of this economic growth would be complete without taking into account Israel’s strong, vibrant and highly dynamic research system. Israel maintains a long-established record of activity and achievements in basic and applied scientific research.

The following are some indicators of Israel’s strength in science: • In recent years three Israeli scientists have been awarded the Nobel Prize • Israel ranks 17th in terms of the number of citations and 21st in terms of the

number of published papers among the 145 countries/territories monitored by the ISI’s Essential Science Indicators [THOMSON, 2007] and based on publications in the last ten years.

• In relative terms, Israel ranks third in the world, behind Switzerland and Sweden, in the number of scientific articles per capita and seventh in the world in citations per capita [DE FONTENAY & CARMEL, 2001].

• Israel ranks among the top ten countries in terms of citations, based on the last ten years of publications in computer science, psychiatry/psychology and social sciences, general and its rank is between 11 and 16 (i.e., higher than its overall rank) in biology & biochemistry, immunology, mathematics, molecular biology & genetics and in neuroscience & behavior [THOMSON, 2007]. Here the data is for the ISI subject classification into twenty two fields and not into the twelve major fields used in other parts of the study.



• R&D intensity in Israel in 2001 represents 4.8% of GDP – of the highest ratios alongside 4.27% in Sweden, 3.49 in Finland, 3.06% in Japan and 2.8% in the US [EUROPEAN COMMISSION, 2003].

• Leading international academic institutions – National science citation intensity, measured as the ratio of scientific citations of all papers to the national GDP places Israel alongside the strongest performers by this measure: Switzerland, Sweden, Finland and Denmark [CORDIS, 2007]

Israel’s research is a reflection of its scientific publications. According to the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE), Israel adds about 1.2% of the all publications to the world total (see Figure 1). This contribution is (except for some annual fluctuations) quite stable. Israel’s share in the world total lies actually between that of Denmark and Belgium (cf. [GLÄNZEL & AL., 2007A]). However, concerning publication output per-capita, Israel ranks at the top of the list, immediately behind Sweden and Switzerland. The cross-national comparison of this indicator is presented in Figure 2.

Figure 1. Scientific publications of Israel as percentage of the World’s publication output Source: Web of Science

Although scientific collaboration cannot always be depicted by co-authorship in an

adequate manner (e.g., [KATZ & MARTIN, 1997]), joint publications are one of the most



tangible and well documented forms of collaboration in research. Nonetheless, international co-publications proved a good indicator of co-operation at this level [GLÄNZEL & SCHUBERT, 2004].

Figure 2. Per-capita publication output and citation impact (publication year 2004) Source: Web of Science

A first look at the publication data [GLÄNZEL & AL., 2007B] reveals a strong

increase of Israel’s international level of cooperation. Israel increased publication output according to the SCIE by about two thirds in the period 1991–2005 but the number of internationally co-authored papers has more than doubled in the same time. Thus, out of the total papers published by Israeli authors in the sciences, the share of internationally coauthored papers grew from 31.8% in 1991 to 38.8% in 1998 and finally to 41.9% in 2005. With regard to authorship statistics, the percent of papers published by Israeli researchers and co-authored with US authors, that is, the share of US-Israeli co-operation in all internationally co-authored publications of Israel has only increased by about 10% over the whole period 1991–2005. The share of EU15 collaboration in all Israeli ‘international’ papers, on the other hand, has considerably grown, particularly, by 80%. This trend is presented in Figure 3. Nevertheless, with



more than 50% of all international papers of Israel, the United States is still Israel’s most important partner. These results are in line with the calculations prepared for the United States-Israel Educational Foundation (USIEF) by Gideon Czapski6 (Hebrew University in Jerusalem, HUJI). The decrease in the Israeli-US collaborations could possibly be explained by the decrease in the share of the US publications [ZHOU & LEYDESDORFF, 2006; GLÄNZEL & AL., 2008].

Figure 3. The evolution of the share of US and EU co-authorship in all Israeli publications Source: Web of Science

A further look reveals that among the European countries Germany, France, UK,

Italy and the Netherlands are presently Israel’s most important partners in Europe. The evolution of their contribution to Israel’s international co-publications can be found in Table 1. Only those countries, which are contributing with at least 5% to all international co-publications of Israel in 2005, are presented here.

6 Presented at a Fulbright Israel workshop, Herzliya, 2005.



Table 1. The share of international collaboration of Israel’s most important partners in all Israeli co-publications in 1991, 1998 and 2005

Country 1991 1998 2005 USA 64.3% 55.1% 53.2% Germany 12.2% 16.1% 15.2% France 6.8% 9.0% 10.6% UK 6.5% 9.4% 9.5% Italy 2.4% 5.9% 7.4% Canada 6.0% 6.8% 6.7% Netherlands 1.8% 4.0% 5.3%

Source: Science Citation Index Expanded The question arises of in how far this trend mirrors the decline in the overall

percentage of the US output in world total in scientific articles that has already been reported in several European studies (e.g., [REIST-2, 1997; REIST-3, 2003]). The share of the US output was shrinking from 35.6% in 1991 to 30.5% in 2005 (cf. [GLÄNZEL & AL., 2008]). The decline in the relative prominence of the US as a scientific partner for Israel as measured by article co-authorship may to a certain extent be explained by a decline in the relative prominence of the US in the world science overall. Taking into account that also the EU15 is losing weight in the world total since about the Millennium change, mirroring the relative decline of the USA and Japan [GLÄNZEL & AL., 2008], and intensification of EU-Israel co-operation has continued after 1998, this global trend cannot explain all aspects of the evolution of bilateral relations alone. Thus, the ‘weight’ of the US might be lessening because the ‘weight’ of others like China, Brazil, Taiwan, Korea, India and Turkey is rising, but this phenomenon presently holds to a lesser extent for the EU15, too [ZHOU & LEYDESDORFF, 2006; GLÄNZEL & AL., 2008]. Although changes in national publication output might not have an immediate effect on bilateral relations, they do influence the strength of bilateral co-publication links.

We use Salton’s (cosine) measure as an indicator of international collaboration strength. This measure is defined as the number of joint publications divided by the square root of the product of the number (i.e., the geometric mean) of total publication outputs of the corresponding pair of countries (cf. [GLÄNZEL, 2001]). Consequently, the strength of a bilateral co-operation might change even if the share of bilateral papers in the output of one of the countries is unchanged but that of the other one increases or decreases. Thus, Figure 4 supplements Figure 3 on the evolution of the share of US and EU co-authorship by taking into account the publication dynamics of Israel’s partners, as well. According to the Salton measure, the strength of co-operation link with the US is still increasing, however, to a lesser extent than that with the EU. The change of scholarly co-operation between Israel and Europe can best be visualized by ‘scientopograhical’ maps. Figure 4 presents Israel’s most important scientific co-operation partners in the world in 1991 and 2005. We have used three different



thresholds 1.0%, 2.5% and 5.0% to visualise the intensity of co-operation. The strength of 5% is however not reached by any link. The growing number of medium strong links substantiates the increasing role of Europe.

Figure 4. Co-authorship map for Israel in all fields combined in 1991(left) and 2005 (right) based on Salton’s measure (dotted line ≥ 1.0%, solid line ≥ 2.5%, thick line ≥ 5.0%)

Source: Web of Science and University of Alabama, Cartographic Research Lab (geographical map)

In what follows, we will have a look at the profile and the impact of collaborative

research in Israel. International co-authorship is expected to result, on an average, in publications with higher citation rates than purely domestic papers. However, the influence of international collaboration on the national citation impact generally varies considerably between the countries (and within one individual country between fields) but in some cases there might be even no citation advantage for one or even for both partners (cf. [GLÄNZEL & SCHUBERT, 2001]). In order to analyze the citation impact of Israel’s bilateral publication links we have used the following indicators.

• Activity Index (AI) is defined as the ratio of the share of a given field in the publications of a given country to the share of the same field in the world total publications. This indicator was originally used in economics as Comparative Advantage Index typically calculated with export data; it has later been introduced by FRAME [1977] in bibliometrics, and is used in macro studies (e.g., [SCHUBERT & AL., 1989]). AI takes its values in the range [0, ∞), where its neutral value is 1. AI = 0 indicates a completely idle



research field, AI < 1 indicates a lower-than-average and AI > 1 a higher-than-average activity. AI reflects the internal balance among the fields in the given country, that is, AI > 1 values in several fields must always be balanced by AI < 1 in others: AI cannot always be greater (less) than 1. Here a version of the Activity Index is used to compare the subject profile of Israel’s internationally co-authored papers with that of all Israeli publications.

• Mean Observed Citation Rate (MOCR). MOCR is defined as the ratio of citation count to publication count. It reflects the factual citation impact of a country, region, institution, research group etc. A three-year citation window has been applied.

• Mean Expected Citation Rate (MECR). The expected citation rate of a single paper is defined as the average citation rate of all papers published in the same journal in the same year. Instead of the one-year citation window to publications of the two preceding years as used in the Journal Citation Report (JCR), a three-year citation window to one source year is used, as explained above. For a set of papers assigned to a given country, region or institution in a given field or subfield, the indicator is the average of the individual expected citation rates over the whole set.

• Relative Citation Rate (RCR). RCR is defined as the ratio of the Citation Rate per Publication to the Expected Citation Rate per Publication, that is, RCR = MOCR/MECR. This indicator measures whether the publications of a country or institution attract more or less citations than expected on the basis of the impact measures, i.e., the average citation rates of the journals in which they appeared. Since the citation rates of the papers are gauged against the standards set by the specific journals, it is largely insensitive to the big differences between the citation practices of the different science fields and subfields. It should be stressed that in this study, a 3-year citation window to one source year is used for the calculation of both the enumerator and denominator of RCR. RCR = 0 corresponds to un-citedness, RCR < 1 means lower-than-average, RCR > 1 higher-than-average citation rate, RCR = 1 if the set of papers in question attracts just the number of citations expected on the basis of the average citation rate of the publishing journals. RCR has been introduced by SCHUBERT & AL. [1983], and largely been applied to comparative macro and meso studies since. It should be mentioned that a version of this relative measure, namely, CPP/JCSm is used at CWTS in Leiden (see [MOED & AL., 1995]).



• Normalised Mean Citation Rate (NMCR). NMCR is defined analogously to the RCR as the ratio of the Mean Observed Citation Rate to the weighted average of the mean citation rates of subfields. This indicator is a second expected citation rate; in contrast to the RCR, NMCR gauges citation rates of the papers against the standards set by the specific subfields. Its neutral value is 1 and NMCR >(<) 1 indicates higher(lower)-than-average citation rate than expected on the basis of the average citation rate of the subfield. NMCR has been introduced by BRAUN & GLÄNZEL [1990] in the context of national publication strategy. A similar measure (CPP/FCSm) is used at CWTS (cf. [MOED & AL., 1995]).

• The ratio NMCR/RCR reflects the average level of journals chosen for publication. In particular, NMCR/RCR>1 (<1) means that the journal impact of periodicals where the unit publishes is on average higher (lower) than the subject impact where the unit is active.

The breakdown by subject fields for Israel shows that the intensity of collaboration is not uniformly distributed over fields. The preferred domains of co-operation with foreign countries are mathematics, the natural and applied sciences as well as earth and space sciences. The co-publication activity in clinical and experimental medicine and biomedical research are relatively low as compared to other disciplines and the national profile. The changes during the last 25 years are not dramatic and the profile is now somewhat closer to shape of a regular dodecagon representing the national standard (see Figure 5).

According to our expectations, the impact of international co-publication distinctly exceeded that of the national standard in most fields. Most interesting is the fact that the most striking increase is observed in fields that do not represent a relatively high collaboration activity (clinical medicine and biomedical research). The corresponding citation indicators are presented in Table 2.

The influence of international collaboration compared to the national standard is thus clearly measurable. This applies above all to collaboration with the US, Europe and Japan. The effect of collaboration with these countries is strictly positive; the factual citation rates lie here far above both the journal and the field based expectation. The breakdown of scientific collaboration in all fields combined by co-publication partners is presented in Table 3.



Table 2. Citation impact of internationally collaboration compared with all Israeli publications by subject fields, 1991 (a) and 2003 (b)

(a) MOCR RCR NMCR NMCR/RCR Field All Int. coll. All Int. coll. All Int. coll. All Int. coll.

AGRI 1.71 2.30 1.10 1.35 1.19 1.62 1.08 1.20 BIOL 2.71 3.31 0.90 0.99 0.94 1.10 1.04 1.11 BIOS 6.67 9.28 0.98 1.22 0.99 1.34 1.01 1.10 BIOM 2.88 5.26 0.82 1.09 0.79 1.38 0.96 1.27 CLI1 3.18 7.37 0.81 1.16 0.79 1.57 0.98 1.35 CLI2 1.51 3.20 0.74 1.12 0.69 1.38 0.93 1.23 NEUR 3.14 4.82 0.91 1.18 0.95 1.38 1.04 1.17 CHEM 3.10 3.95 0.91 1.07 1.15 1.47 1.26 1.37 PHYS 4.05 5.09 0.93 1.04 1.23 1.46 1.32 1.40 GEOS 2.79 5.00 0.92 1.25 1.07 1.73 1.16 1.38 ENGN 1.45 2.12 1.10 1.39 1.21 1.81 1.10 1.30 MATH 1.02 1.08 1.03 1.05 1.17 1.27 1.14 1.21 (b)

MOCR RCR NMCR NMCR/RCR Field All Int. coll. All Int. coll. All Int. coll. All Int. coll.

AGRI 2.69 3.15 0.97 1.06 0.99 1.15 1.02 1.08 BIOL 5.32 6.47 1.09 1.29 1.13 1.38 1.04 1.07 BIOS 8.08 9.96 0.94 1.00 1.01 1.22 1.07 1.22 BIOM 5.69 7.36 0.99 1.12 1.08 1.36 1.09 1.21 CLI1 5.19 9.70 0.96 1.22 0.79 1.38 0.82 1.13 CLIN2 3.43 5.47 0.92 1.23 0.83 1.28 0.90 1.04 NEUR 4.84 5.96 0.90 0.96 0.99 1.15 1.10 1.20 CHEM 4.76 4.84 0.92 0.92 1.21 1.22 1.32 1.33 PHYS 4.43 5.78 1.04 1.23 1.27 1.61 1.22 1.31 GEOS 5.70 7.43 1.07 1.21 1.26 1.52 1.18 1.26 ENGN 2.27 2.79 1.25 1.46 1.37 1.70 1.10 1.16 MATH 1.75 1.93 1.11 1.17 1.23 1.32 1.11 1.13

Source: Science Citation Index Expanded

Table 3. Citation impact of international collaboration with Israel’s most important partners in 1991, 1997 and 2003 (A=RCR; B=NMCR)

1991 1997 2003 Country A B B/A A B B/A A B B/A

USA 1.21 1.77 1.46 1.12 1.66 1.48 1.22 1.65 1.35 EUR 1.19 1.47 1.23 1.27 1.64 1.29 1.26 1.68 1.33 DEU 1.24 1.51 1.22 1.38 1.77 1.28 1.46 2.07 1.42 GBR 1.60 1.94 1.21 1.77 2.33 1.32 1.41 2.03 1.44 FRA 1.35 1.68 1.25 1.50 2.10 1.40 1.38 1.97 1.43 ITA 1.72 2.67 1.55 2.11 2.92 1.38 1.29 1.78 1.38 CND 1.23 1.69 1.37 1.62 2.22 1.37 1.32 1.73 1.30 JPN 1.75 2.08 1.18 1.88 2.67 1.42 1.50 2.05 1.36 RUS 1.03 1.53 1.49 2.40 2.82 1.18 1.39 1.70 1.22 NLD 2.46 3.21 1.31 3.07 4.00 1.31 1.35 1.87 1.39 ISR 0.91 1.04 1.15 0.95 1.08 1.15 0.98 1.06 1.08

Source: Science Citation Index Expanded



Figure 5. Subject profile of Israeli international research collaboration based on the Activity Index, 1991 (dotted line) and 2003 (thick line). The national standard is indicated by a thin solid line

Discussion

The research relationship between Israel and Europe and the European Union

Israel has a significant foothold in the European research landscape. Israel is an associate member of the European Framework Programme – the details of which are expanded below; she is a member of Eureka and will be assuming its presidency in 2010–2011; she is on track to join the OECD in 2008–2009; she is a founding member of ALLEA – the All European Academies and a founding member of EMBL – the European Molecular Biology Laboratory; she enjoys observer status at both the European science Foundation and at CERN and is a contributing member of the ESRF; additionally, Israel is a member of COST – European Cooperation in the Field of Scientific and Technical research, and the Galileo project.



Scientific and technological co-operation is a significant component defining relations between Israel and the European Union. Scientific co-operation between Israel and Europe has brought new opportunities for Israeli enterprises, research organisations and universities through sharing experience and access to EU markets. The FP7 is now the second largest funding agency for R&D in Israel, second only to the Israel Science Foundation.

Since Israel’s first participation in the Framework Programme in 1996, R&D co-operation with the EU has enjoyed remarkable success; Israeli scholars bring to European research groups high levels of scholarship, an entrepreneurialship spirit, motivation and enthusiasm. Statistics obtained from the European Commission indicate that in FP5 there were 602 funded contracts involving at least one Israeli partner; in these contracts there were a total of 757 Israeli partners; and the budget of these contracts totalled 156.4 million Euro. In FP6 these figures were 550 contracts involving at least one Israeli partner; in these contracts there were a total of 711 Israeli partners; and the budget of these contracts totalled 173.8 million Euro – reflecting a policy of funding fewer projects but with larger budgets [DUCHENE, 2007].

The value to Israel, however, cannot only be explained by the level of funding; networking capabilities are a tremendous benefit as well. In FP5 there were a total of 5,935 partners involved in contracts with Israeli participants, with a total combined budget value of 1 billion Euro; in FP6 these figures jumped to 8,834 partners in projects totalling 2.3 billion Euro [DUCHENE, 2007].

There is a particularly strong track record of co-operation in Information Technology and Life Sciences mobility programmes. Israeli universities are playing a growing role in European studies, and in the Seventh Programme this participation will probably be even greater, thanks to the establishment of the European Research Council (ERC), whose key goal is to promote basic research.

Research projects on the frontier of science express bi-national and multinational cooperation and multi- and inter-disciplinary collaboration among scientists of diverse nations. Israel nurtures cooperation with overseas scientists as a matter of policy, and Israel’s participation in the Framework Programme is a central component of this policy.

IRC-Israel is the Israeli office of the Innovation Relay Centre Network, one of 71 offices in Europe. The IRC Network is an EC program, today the world’s largest Technology Transfer Network. The IRC network matches the technologies offered to the technologies required so as to create additional value for organizations through transnational technological cooperation [IRC, 2006]. The Innovation Center (IRC) Israel works with all of the major universities in Israel. The aims of IRC Israel are to prepare the technology offers, and to disseminate the relevant offers and requests that are pertinent to university researchers.



ISERD – The Israeli Directorate for EU FP – aims at promoting joint Israeli-EU R&D ventures within the EU’s R&D Framework Program. ISERD actively assists academic and industrial entities in preparing and submitting their EU-RTD program proposals; provides help in locating partners and provides training and consulting services. Figures 6 and 7 depict Israel’s success in the Sixth Framework Programme.

Israel and the USA

Decreasing United States participation in global science, no matter how it is measured, has been well documented in recent years (see e.g. [GLÄNZEL & AL., 2008; LEYDESDORFF & WAGNER, 2007]). There is a documented decrease in federal funding of non-defense basic research, in recent years. Dominance, however, is not the keyword for the 21st century; scientific cooperation and knowledge sharing are. Partnering in the global scientific network and knowing how to maximize and exploit shared knowledge will be key for future scientific and technological discovery.

Anecdotal evidence points to a decrease in federal funding levels vis-à-vis Israeli basic research. Some argue that this funding decrease, combined with Israeli’s entry into the European Union Research Framework Programme may signal a shift in Israel’s orientation away from The United States. Empirical evidence from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Science Citation Index (SCI) (co-authorship trends) seem to support this (see Table 1). Europe will soon reach parity (if not surpass) the USA with regards to the funding of research and the joint conduct of science in Israel.

Figure 6. Grants to Israeli organizations in FP6 (million euros) (Source: ISERD)



Figure 7. Israeli participation in FP6 (Source: ISERD)

The relative drop in the US share of international collaborative journal articles

(co-authorship) is a well-known, long-term phenomenon (e.g. [CZAPSKI, 2003]). It mostly reflects the increased globalization of good science, another well-known, long-term trend, to which the EU Framework Programme was probably a minor, though positive, contributor – certainly in Japan which is a non-EU member. Thus, “the impact of the US” is lessening, because the impact of others is rising.

The US government has no explicit overall federal policy towards international cooperation in science and technology. Individual missions and scientific agencies have international offices that manage international relations, but even within the agencies, there is rarely an explicit policy to support international cooperation. Generally within the US government, international cooperation becomes a means to achieve a scientific or technical mission where the scale and scope of investment is too large for a single country to undertake alone, or where efficiencies or resources to be gained from cooperating make this an attractive option. The NIH directly funds foreign research, most other agencies fund international research only when it is tied to US-based research of some kind. We note that, notwithstanding the overall decrease in funding from US federal sources, the NIH still funds more medical research in Israel than the Israel Ministry of Health. This says more about the little local funding available for research than about the amounts received from abroad.

Traditionally Israeli science was strongly oriented towards the US. Post doctoral scholars were sent mainly to the US on the basis of previous contacts, thus creating lifelong collaborations with US scientists and institutions. One of the main actors in this



relationship has been the BSF – The U.S.-Israel Binational Science Foundation, established in 1972 – dedicated to maintaining joint research and creating new contacts between American and Israeli scientists. The creation of the bi-national foundations was an unusual step in first establishing the principle of cooperation and later the subjects for cooperation. (The other exception has been Russia.) This step was envied by other countries and there were many requests to imitate it. However, Israel and Russia presented special cases of political gains attached to S&T relationships so Congress approved these special programs.

As a general rule, scientific collaboration that is self-organized and related to missions, and is peer reviewed, is higher quality science with greater potential for positive outcomes. This is particularly true for the US, because its position as a world scientific leader has meant that since many countries are interested in collaborating with the US, the US is able to choose the best.

For a long time – until the beginning of the 1990’s – the United States was the main foreign source for funding basic science research projects in Israel. Competition began in 1986 with the establishment of GIF, the German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development, distributing money for joint German-Israeli research. Early Israeli-German scientific cooperation in life science and medicine was studied by GRANIT & PERITZ [1993]. At the same time there was a substantial growth in funding from the Israel Science Foundation from $4M to about $50M per year.

The BSF with its $13.5M per year in awards, declined from a major actor to a minor actor; in terms of fixed-dollars, the BSF budget has eroded by about 25% since 1996. On the positive side the BSF and BARD (The United States – Israel Binational Agricultural Research and Development Fund) still get requests from foremost scientists in both countries. Moreover they receive more worthy requests that they cannot support because of lack of funds. The BSF now funds only one of four proposals. The BSF’s and BARD’s basic funds did not grow (nominally in dollars) during the last 25 years [BSF, N. D.; KATZ, 2007] and their buying power eroded by some 15%.

Reviewers of BARD submissions are suggested by the Israeli and US panel members independently. Interesting to note that between 2000 and 2007 the percentage of European reviewers have gone up from 24% to 29%, while the percentage of US reviewers decreased from 56% to 49% [KATZ, 2007].

The diminished impact of US federal funding of research in Israel in recent years has resulted from two main reasons: the availability of European and other alternative funding sources and the diminishing budgets (in real buying power of modern research) of existing sources such as the binational funds.

On the other hand, we are witnessing an increasing interest by US states and universities (rather than by the Federal Government), countries such as Canada, India, Korea, China, Australia, and the European Union, in collaboration with Israeli scientists



through matching funding arrangements (managed by the Ministry of Science <www.most.gov.il> and/or MATIMOP <www.matimop.org.il>). They realize not only the direct benefits of such collaboration (twice the research for every dollar invested, with this figure increasing with synergistic collaboration) but also the indirect ones such as the benefits derived from the sabbaticals spent by Israeli scientists (partially funded by the Israeli government) in their countries and regions, and more.

Conclusions and future research

In this study we have shown that the cooperation share of the EU countries with Israel increases over time, and that there is a decline in the share of the US, which is still the major country collaborating with Israel. There are, therefore, policy implications for the US government and funding agencies, the European Union and the Israeli government.

The Americans need to assess their funding levels in the binational funding schemes; as we have demonstrated funding levels are decreasing. Building on recent gains, the European Union should not only maintain but indeed strengthen its relationship to Israel via the FP and additional mechanisms. Finally, the Israeli government must evaluate its continued membership in the FP scheme and its contributions to its binational frameworks with the USA. If it values its relationship to American science, it should carefully consider increasing its share of the USA-Israel binational schemes. At the same time, it should continue its membership in the FP.

Recognizing these changing realities, universities should provide ample support for the developing collaborative ties between Israeli and European scholars, in the form of seed money, consultancy services and travel subsidies, for example – given the consortia nature of FP project proposal submissions.

In a future study we will broaden the scope of the research to include changing mobility patterns among students and academics. Whereas once most student exchanges and foreign study was between the US and Israel, this situation we believe is in flux. Many US academic institutions are reluctant to recognize the full credit load of three-year undergraduate students; this might be impacting ones decision to study in America. Alongside this dynamic is the Bologna Process underway in Europe, and the various scholarship programs in Europe designed to facilitate mobility between countries. Given this, we will examine the potential mobility shift underway as another indicator of the changing landscape.



*

The authors express their sincere appreciation to the following individuals who graciously provided data and insightful comments: Prof. Gideon Czapski, Ms. Stefane Dor, Mr. Dr. Vincent Duchêne, Ms. Ilana Gross-Budilovsky, Mr. Haim Katz, Ms. Hava Klein, Ms. Tony Levy, Mr. Israel Shamay, Mr. Marcel Shaton, and Dr. Neal Sherman. Finally, we are indebted to Mr. Balázs Schlemmer for his creative assistance in preparing the ‘scientopographical’ maps.

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