Tag: Industry

April 18, 2023

The EU greenwashed fossil gas. Today, we are suing.

Post By zittrexstore Politics , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , No Comments

Last July, EU policymakers decided to greenwash fossil gas. Today, the WWF European Policy Office, Client Earth, BUND and Transport & Environment are taking them to the European Court of Justice.

We are doing it to reassert a basic truth: all fossil fuels are dangerous for the planet. Only last summer, European cities baked under fierce heatwaves, rivers across our continent ran dry, and whole swathes of France, Spain, and Portugal were burned by unprecedented wildfires. In the midst of this devastation, the EU approved a new chapter of its supposed green investment guidebook — the EU Taxonomy — which stated that fossil gas-fired electricity is ‘green’. In fact, fossil gas is a fossil fuel that can cause plumes of methane that harm the climate just as badly as coal.

However, under the guise of climate action, the gas Taxonomy could divert tens of billions of euros from green projects into the very fossil fuels which are causing those heatwaves, droughts, and wildfires. This is while scientific experts at the International Energy Agency and the United Nations continue to stress that we must halt any expansion of fossil fuels and invest exclusively in developing clean energy sources. Even the EU’s own experts have said we must use much less gas by 2030. The gas Taxonomy is not just at odds with the science: it also flies in the face of market dynamics. Renewable investments across the world reached $500 billion last year, which shows that there is already a massive, readily available alternative to gas-fired power.

For all these reasons, having previously filed a request for the Commission to review the gas Taxonomy, we are filing a case at the CJEU today. We will argue that the gas Taxonomy, and the Commission’s refusal to review it, clash with the European Climate Law, the precautionary principle, and the Taxonomy Regulation — the law on which the Taxonomy is built. It also undermines the EU’s obligations under the Paris Agreement. We expect a judgment within the next two years.

Fossil gas at the heart of two European crises

Europe faces two interlocking crises: an inflation crisis and a climate crisis. Fossil gas is at the heart of both. Had we decided to invest with more determination in renewables and energy efficiency even just 10 years ago, our continent would not have been so dependent on energy imports. We would not have faced such great spikes in energy and food prices, which disproportionately hurt our poorest citizens. We would be closer to meeting our Paris Agreement goals.

Instead,  largely due to decades of industry pressure — the gas lobby spends up to €78 million a year in Brussels alone — our continent has remained extremely dependent on destructive fossil fuels. That dependency must end. It is high time to direct billions of euros into installing more renewables more quickly, with a focus on secure, cheap wind and solar power. It is time to expand the technologies to back them up, such as building insulation, energy storage, and strong grids. And above all, it is time to stop the lie that putting money into any fossil fuel will help the green transition. That is the purpose of our legal case.

Policymakers and financial institutions beware

EU policymakers are increasingly inserting references to the EU Taxonomy into other policies. If our case is successful, and the Taxonomy’s gas criteria are overturned, any legislation tying gas financing to the Taxonomy would become inapplicable.

Policymakers beware: the Taxonomy is on shaky ground, and you should not use it to justify new gas investments. Fossil fuel companies that get hooked on green funding will face a rude awakening if our legal case cuts that support off. They may even incur steep losses if they have made investments based on EU policies only to find that gas has been struck out of them.

Fossil fuel companies that get hooked on green funding will face a rude awakening if our legal case cuts that support off.

Financial institutions also face real reputational, financial and legal risks from the gas Taxonomy. Fossil gas is excluded from the global green bond market. Leading institutions such as the European Investment Bank or the Dutch pension federation have openly criticized the Taxonomy’s greenwashing. What is more, taxonomies in several other countries exclude fossil gas-fired power, so the European one lags behind. Any financial institution that uses the EU Taxonomy to justify investing in fossil gas assets therefore risks direct, robust and repeated attacks on its reputation.

The inexorable public policy shift towards energy efficiency and renewables, and the plummeting price of wind and solar power, have made fossil gas-fired power uncompetitive. Investments in more fossil gas, even if encouraged by the EU Taxonomy, would quickly result in stranded assets and could even cause billion-euro losses. Financial institutions must guard against these risks by stopping their support for gas expansion now.

Finally, if our case is successful, financial institutions could find they have purchased or sold products mislabeled as ‘green’. They must be careful to verify the legal consequences of such an event, particularly for its impact on any climate claims they have made.

Our message to the EU

Policymakers and financial institutions should note that the Taxonomy faces four further court cases: one from the governments of Austria and Luxembourg, one from Greenpeace, one from the Trinational Association for Nuclear Protection (ATPN) and another from MEP René Repasi. The EU’s greenwashing is now being discredited from all sides – amongst scientists, in financial markets, and soon, we expect, by the judiciary.

Our message to the EU is simple: do not help fossil lobbyists to block our continent’s move to clean, cheap and secure energy. If you do, we will meet you head-on.

Victor Hugo once said that nobody can stop an idea whose time has come. Today, despite much fossil fuel lobbying, denial and delay, it is the turn of the green transition. Our message to the EU is simple: do not help fossil lobbyists to block our continent’s move to clean, cheap and secure energy. If you do, we will meet you head-on.

See you in court.



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March 1, 2023

No silver bullet: Ensuring the right packaging solutions for Europe

Post By zittrexstore Politics , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , No Comments

When most people think of McDonald’s they likely think of quality food, good value and consistently reliable convenient service. But I hope they also think about our values.

At McDonald’s, we care deeply about our impact on the world. Our purpose is to feed and foster local communities. We are always striving to use our influence and scale to make a positive impact on the planet and in the communities we serve across Europe and globally. We are on a journey to help implement and accelerate solutions to keep waste out of nature and valuable materials in use.

Our purpose is to feed and foster local communities.

During my trip to Europe, I’ve seen some of these solutions in action. While in Brussels I had the opportunity to visit one of our restaurants at the forefront of advancing our circularity goals. McDonald’s is the first major partner of a pioneering initiative ‘The Cup Collective’. It is a great project by Stora Enso and Huhtamaki to collect cardboard beverage and ice cream cups in and around our restaurants and recycle them on an industrial scale into paper fiber. At our busy  restaurant in Brussels-North station, I saw the initiative firsthand. This is a fantastic example of several stakeholders working together to solve a problem through their expertise and innovation.

I know policymakers across the EU are trying to solve many of the greatest challenges we face today, including Europe’s growing packaging waste problem, and we at McDonald’s fully support this, as the example above demonstrates. The problem is, history itself is littered with examples of the unintended consequences of well-meaning policies and laws. I believe the current Packaging and Packaging Waste proposal by the EU is one such regulation. By focusing solely on reusable packaging, we at McDonald’s and many of our partners and competitors in the informal dining out sector believe that Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) will actually be counterproductive to the overall goals of the Green Deal. And we support the goals of the Green Deal, which is why this concerns us.

The informal eating-out sector is particularly complex and is not well understood. We feel the impact study the EU commissioned ahead of the PPWR proposal did not necessarily reflect that as much as it could have. We want such important decisions to be based on science, facts, and evidence, which is why we commissioned a report with the global management consultancy Kearney to assess environmental, economic, hygiene and affordability impacts of various packaging solutions. As a result of this, we firmly believe the proposal will be damaging not only for the environment, but also for the economy, food safety and for consumers.

Of course, the idea of reusing something over and over again as opposed to only once seems like the obvious solution — but it’s more complicated than that. For reuse models to have a positive impact on the environment, consumers need to return the reusables. A reusable cup needs to be returned and reused 50 to 100 times — whether for takeaway or dine-in — to make it environmentally preferable to a single-use paper cup.

Reusables by their very nature also need to be washed every time they’re used. For an industry like ours, serving millions of customers every day, that requires significant energy and water. Europe’s water infrastructure is already under stress, and the Kearney study shows reusable packaging requirements for dine-in restaurants would increase water use — and could require up to 4 billion liters of additional water each year. Washing also requires more energy resulting in increased greenhouse emissions. The study shows that a shift to 100 percent reusable packaging by 2030 would increase greenhouse emissions by up to 50 percent for dine-in and up to 260 percent for takeaway. They also require specialist washing to ensure they meet hygiene standards.

The study shows that a shift to 100 percent reusable packaging by 2030 would increase greenhouse emissions.

When it comes to plastics we are particularly concerned. McDonald’s has made huge progress when it comes to reducing plastic in our supply chain and restaurants. In the European Union, more than 90 percent of our packaging is locally sourced, primarily from European paper packaging suppliers. We are shifting packaging materials to more sustainable alternatives to ensure easier recovery and recycling. 92.8 percent (by weight) of McDonald’s food packaging in Europe is wood fiber and 99.4 percent of that fiber packaging comes from recycled or certified sources.

Worryingly though, the study we commissioned says that reuse models will lead to a sharp increase in plastic materials in Europe.Reuse targets proposed in the PPWR will create four times the amount of plastic packaging waste for dine-in, and 16 times for takeaway. That’s a lot more plastic instead of recyclable paper and cardboard and is the opposite of what the EU wants to achieve.

So, what should be done? Given that Kearney’s data shows recyclable, fiber-based packaging has the greater potential to benefit the environment, economy, food safety and consumers, we believe the EU should pause and conduct a full impact study before moving ahead. The European Commission’s current impact assessment lacks depth and does not consider economic and food safety aspects. Member countries should not unilaterally introduce legislation before this has been assessed to avoid fragmentation of the single market.

We believe the EU should pause and conduct a full impact study before moving ahead.

In dine in and takeaway, we are looking for equivalence of treatment between recycled and recyclable (paper based) single use packaging and reusable tableware. Any legislation should take into account the specific needs of complex business sectors, and the right packaging solutions.

A rush to a solution for a complicated situation will only make the problem worse. I hope that the report McDonald’s commissioned and launched with Kearney will stimulate the policy debate about the mix of solutions needed. Europe has a proud history of collaboration and pragmatism when it comes to solving important problems and challenges, and I am confident we can draw on that when it comes to this particular issue — because there really is no silver bullet when it comes to solving Europe’s packaging problem.

www.nosilverbullet.eu



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January 27, 2023

Building Europe’s future, focusing on IT skills rather than degrees

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As the digital transformation of economy and society accelerates, the question of a just and inclusive transformation must be at the forefront of considerations for deciders in the public and private sector.

“The Digital Decade is about making digital technology work for people and businesses. It is about enabling everyone to have the skills to participate in the digital society. To be empowered. It is about empowering businesses. It is about the infrastructure that keeps us connected. It is about bringing government services closer to citizens. Europe’s digital transformation will give opportunities for everyone.” Margrethe Vestager, executive vice president for A Europe Fit for the Digital Age, July 2022.

The Digital Decade is about making digital technology work for people and businesses.

The European Union (EU) has grasped the urgency and importance of providing digital skills to citizens, declaring 2023 the European Year of Skills. Reaching the EU’s goal of 80 percent of Europeans with basic digital skills and 20 million ICT specialists by 2030 won’t happen in a snap. The opportunities here are immense: the World Economic Forum predicts 97 million new jobs related to technology. Many promise to be better jobs than the ones they will replace. Because skills in cybersecurity or the internet of things, for example, can lead to positions that offer opportunities for advancement and life-changing opportunities for people everywhere, including underprivileged or marginalized communities around the world.

The scale of the digital skills challenge and opportunity demands close collaboration with the tech industry, governments, and academia — to close the gap in technology skills that stood at 2 million unfilled tech jobs globally in 2022[1].

What’s more, those who have been displaced will in many cases be good candidates to upskill for the new roles. A high percentage of these jobs don’t necessarily require a high-level degree, for example. Many roles demand candidates have the right tech skills rather than degrees.

Accessibility and flexibility are key

If there is one glaring truth that surfaces from all my encounters throughout Europe it’s that for a training and upskilling program to work, learners must be empowered in ever more flexible ways, to learn where and when they want.

For a training and upskilling program to work, learners must be empowered in ever more flexible ways, to learn where and when they want.

A learner-centric approach is what will make a training program relevant to learners. I firmly believe that our focus on regularly offering new pathways and learning formats is one of the main reasons the Cisco Networking Academy has managed to empower over 17 million learners in 25 years.

Our new Skills For All offering, which proposes self-paced introductory and intermediary courses in cybersecurity, networking and data management, will continue to contribute to this success. It lowers the barriers to entry by allowing learners to dip their toes in the water on their own terms before deciding whether to take the plunge.

Jobs in IT can provide an accessible opportunity for people looking to change their lives and launch themselves into a new career. This is even more true for the underprivileged, underrepresented and underserved.

One obvious starting point is addressing the gender gap in tech. Historically, 26 percent of Networking Academy students over the past 25 years have been women. We’ve made strides forward, but we seek more to benefit from the wider perspective and fresh ideas that the strong inclusion brings of women in the IT sector. This flexibility, however, must be accompanied with a clear effort to remain accessible to as many stakeholders as possible. One of the secrets to the success of our program is the long-term collaboration with public-sector education, administrations, and even armed forces. A collaboration that rests on our focus on keeping our program free of charge and vendor agnostic, and on focusing on training learners in the skills required in the industry.

Reaching every sector with the right digital skills

The challenge we face is that the digital transformation in Europe is not exclusively the business of tech and IT. It impacts everything, from the average agricultural cooperative in Romania, Greece, France or Spain that needs to understand the impact that digital transformation can have on farming, to the local administrations needing to better protect the information of their citizens as increasing numbers of services digitize.

Each scenario requires skills-focused learning pathways so that learners can quickly and easily acquire the knowledge they need in a simplified format.

A responsibility to the future

Today, we are at a critical turning of the tide. I look forward to being able to touch down in any European city in 10 years and see the impact of the talent that we’ve nurtured and empowered. Talent that includes more women, minorities, people with disabilities, adult reskillers, school leavers… the list goes on.

Cisco stands ready to support Europe in its objectives to bring digital skills to more citizens to maximize the opportunity that technology offers, by developing the next generation of talent.

At Cisco, we feel we have a responsibility to make the digital transformation an inclusive one. And I’m incredibly excited to see how our incredible ecosystem of over 11,800 educational institutions and more than 29,000 instructors will strive to deliver on our goal of upskilling 25 million people in the next 10 years.

Cisco stands ready to support Europe in its objectives to bring digital skills to more citizens to maximize the opportunity that technology offers, by developing the next generation of talent who will push the capabilities of technology even further and to give people the skills to engage with technology more securely. Because when people are empowered to craft a more inclusive digital transformation journey, it becomes synonymous with a more prosperous society.

[1] https://technation.io/people-and-skills-report-2022/#key-statistics



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January 23, 2023

A plan for competitive, green and resilient industries

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We, Renew Europe, want our Union to fulfil its promise of prosperity and opportunities for our fellow Europeans. We have championed initiatives to make our continent freer, fairer and greener, but much more remains to be done.

We are convinced that Europe has what it takes to become the global industrial leader, especially in green and digital technologies. Yet it is faced with higher energy prices and lower levels of investment, which creates a double risk of internal and external fragmentation.

The Russian aggression against Ukraine has shown us that our European way of life cannot be taken for granted. While we stand unwaveringly at the side of our Ukrainian friends and commit to the rebuilding of their homeland, we also need to protect our freedom and prosperity.

That is why Europe needs an urgent and ambitious plan for a competitive, productive and innovative industry ‘made in Europe’. Our proposals below would translate into many more jobs, a faster green transition and increased geopolitical influence.

We must improve the conditions for companies, big and small, to innovate, to grow and to thrive globally.

1. Reforms to kick start the European economy: A European Clean Tech, Competitiveness and Innovation Act

While the EU can be proud of its single market, we must improve the conditions for companies, big and small, to innovate, to grow and to thrive globally.

  • In addition to the acceleration of the deployment of sustainable energy, we call on the Commission to propose a European Clean Tech, Competitiveness and Innovation Act, which would:
  • While the EU can be proud of its single market, we must improve the conditions for companies, big and small, to innovate, to grow and to thrive globally.
  • In addition to the acceleration of the deployment of sustainable energy, we call on the Commission to propose a European Clean Tech, Competitiveness and Innovation Act, which would:
  • Cut red tape and administrative burden, focusing on delivering solutions to our companies, particularly for SMEs and startups.
  • Adapt state aid rules for companies producing clean technologies and energies.
  • Introduce fast-track permitting for clean and renewable energies and for industrial projects of general European interest.
  • Streamline the process for important Projects of Common European Interest, with adequate administrative resources.
  • Guarantee EU-wide access to affordable energy for our industries.
  • Strengthen the existing instruments for a just transition of carbon-intensive industries, as they are key to fighting climate change.
  • Facilitate private financing by completing the Capital Markets Union to allow our SMEs and startups to scale up.
  • Set the right conditions to increase Europe’s global share of research and development spending and reach our own target at 3 percent of our GDP.
  • Build up the European Innovation Council to develop breakthrough technologies.
  • Deliver a highly skilled workforce for our industry.
  • Deepen the single market by fully enforcing existing legislation and further harmonization of standards in the EU as well as with third countries.

We need to reduce more rapidly our economic dependencies from third countries, which make our companies and our economies vulnerable.

2. Investments supporting our industry to thrive: A European Sovereignty Fund and Reform Act

While the EU addresses, with unity, all the consequences of the war in Ukraine, we need to reduce more rapidly our economic dependencies from third countries, which make our companies and our economies vulnerable.

In addition to the new framework for raw materials, we call on the Commission to:

  • Create a European Sovereignty Fund, by revising the MFF and mobilizing private investments, to increase European strategic investments across the Union, such as the production on our soil of critical inputs, technologies and goods, which are key to the green and digital transitions.
  • Carry out a sovereignty test to screen European legislation and funds, both existing and upcoming, to demonstrate that they neither harm the EU’s capacity to act autonomously, nor create new dependencies.
  • Modernize the Stability and Growth Pact to incentivize structural reforms and national investments with real added value for our open strategic autonomy, in areas like infrastructure, resources and technologies.

While the EU has to resist protectionist measures, we will always want to promote an open economy with fair competition.

3. Initiatives creating a global level playing field:

A New Generation of Partnerships in the World Act

While the EU has to resist protectionist measures, we will always want to promote an open economy with fair competition.

  • In addition to all the existing reforms made during this mandate, notably on public procurement and foreign subsidies, we call on the Commission to:
  • Make full use of the EU’s economic and political power regarding current trade partners to ensure we get the most for our industry exports and imports, while promoting our values and standards, not least human rights and the Green Deal.
  • Promote new economic partnerships with democratic countries so we can face climate change and all the consequences of the Russian aggression together.
  • Ensure the diversification of supply chains to Europe, particularly regarding critical technologies and raw materials, based on a detailed assessment of current dependencies and alternative sources.
  • Use all our trade policy instruments to promote our prosperity and preserve the single market from distortions from third countries.
  • Take recourse to dispute settlement mechanisms available at WTO level whenever necessary to promote rules-based trade.
  • Adopt a plan to increase our continent’s attractiveness for business projects.
  • Create a truly European screening of the most sensitive foreign investments.
  • We, Renew Europe, believe that taken together these initiatives will foster the development of a competitive and innovative European industry fit for the 21st century. It will pave the way for a better future for Europeans that is more prosperous and more sustainable.



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November 15, 2022

Why is it so difficult to understand the benefits of research infrastructure? – Digital Science

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Persistent identifiers – or PIDs – are long-lasting references to digital resources. In other words, they are a unique label to an entity: a person, place, or thing. PIDs work by redirecting the user to the online resource, even if the location of that resource changes. They also have associated metadata which contains information about the entity and also provide links to other PIDs. For example, many scholars already populate their ORCID records, linking themselves to their research outputs through Crossref and DataCite DOIs. As the PID ecosystem matures, to include PIDs for grants (Crossref grant IDs), projects (RAiD), and organisations (ROR), the connections between PIDs form a graph that describes the research landscape. In this post, Phill Jones talks about the work that the MoreBrains cooperative has been doing to show the value of a connected PID-based infrastructure.

Over the past year or so, we at MoreBrains have been working with a number of national-level research supporting organisations to develop national persistent identifier (PID) strategies: Jisc in the UK; the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) and Australian Access Federation (AAF) in Australia; and the Canadian Research Knowledge Network CRKN, Digital Research Alliance of Canada (DRAC), and Canadian Persistent Identifier Advisory Committee (CPIDAC) in Canada. In all three cases, we’ve been investigating the value of developing PID-based research infrastructures, and using data from various sources, including Dimensions, to quantify that value. In our most recent analysis, we found that investing in five priority PIDs could save the Australian research sector as much as 38,000 person days of work per year, equivalent to $24 million (AUD), purely in direct time savings from rekeying of information into institutional research management systems.

Investing in infrastructure makes a lot of sense, whether you’re building roads, railways, or research infrastructure. But wise investors also want evidence that their investment is worthwhile – that the infrastructure is needed, that it will be used, and, ideally, that there will be a return of some kind on their investment. Sometimes, all of this is easy to measure; sometimes, it’s not.

In the case of PID infrastructure, there has long been a sense that investment would be worthwhile. In 2018, in his advice to the UK government, Adam Tickell recommended:

Jisc to lead on selecting and promoting a range of unique identifiers, including ORCID, in collaboration with sector leaders with relevant partner organisations

More recently, in Australia, the Minister for Education, Jason Clare, wrote a letter of expectations to the Australian Research Council in which he stated:

Streamlining the processes undertaken during National Competitive Grant Program funding rounds must be a high priority for the ARC… I ask that the ARC identify ways to minimise administrative burden on researchers

In the same letter, Minister Clare even suggested that preparations for the 2023 ERA be discontinued until a plan to make the process easier has been developed. While he didn’t explicitly mention PIDs in the letter, organisations like ARDC, AAF, and ARC see persistent identifiers as a big part of the solution to this problem.

A problem of chickens and eggs?

With all the modern information technology available to us it seems strange that, in 2022, we’re still hearing calls to develop basic research management infrastructure. Why hasn’t it already been developed? Part of the problem is that very little work has been done to quantify the value of research infrastructure in general, or PID-based infrastructure in particular. Organisations like Crossref, Datacite, and ORCID are clear success stories but, other than some notable exceptions like this, not much has been done to make the benefits of investment clear at a policy level – until now.

It’s very difficult to analyse the costs and benefits of PID adoption without being able to easily measure what’s happening in the scholarly ecosystem. So, in these recent analyses that we were commissioned to do, we asked questions like:

  • How many research grants were awarded to institutions within a given country?
  • How many articles have been published based on work funded by those grants?
  • What proportion of researchers within a given country have ORCID IDs?
  • How many research projects are active at any given time?

All these questions proved challenging to answer because, fundamentally, it’s extremely difficult to quantify the scale of research activity and the connections between research entities in the absence of universally adopted PIDs. In other words, we need a well-developed network of PIDs in order to easily quantify the benefits of investing in PIDs in the first place! (see Figure 1.)

Luckily, the story doesn’t end there. Thanks to data donated by Digital Science, and other organisations including ORCID, Crossref, Jisc, ARDC, AAF, and several research institutions in the UK, Canada, and Australia, we were able to piece together estimates for many of our calculations.

Take, for example, the Digital Science Dimensions database, which provided us with the data we needed for our Australian and UK use cases. It uses advanced computation and sophisticated machine learning approaches to build a graph of research entities like people, grants, publications, outputs, institutions etc. While other similar graphs exist, some of which are open and free to use – for example, the DataCite PID graph (accessed through DataCite commons), OpenAlex, and the ResearchGraph foundation – the Dimensions graph is the most complete and accessible so far. It enabled us to estimate total research activity in both the UK and Australia.

However, all our estimates are… estimates, because they involve making an automated best guess of the connections between research entities, where those connections are not already explicit. If the metadata associated with PIDs were complete and freely available in central PID registries, we could easily and accurately answer questions like ‘How many active researchers are there in a given country?’ or ‘How many research articles were based on funding from a specific funder or grant program?’

The five priority PIDs

As a starting point towards making these types of questions easy to answer, we recommend that policy-makers work with funders, institutions, publishers, PID organisations, and other key stakeholders around the world to support the adoption of five priority PIDs:

  • DOIs for funding grants
  • DOIs for outputs (eg publications, datasets, etc)
  • ORCIDs for people
  • RAiDs for projects
  • ROR for research-performing organisations

We prioritised these PIDs based on research done in 2019, sponsored by Jisc and in response to the Tickell report, to identify the key PIDs needed to support open access workflows in institutions. Since then, thousands of hours of research and validation across a range of countries and research ecosystems have verified that these PIDs are critical not just for open access but also for improving research workflows in general.

Going beyond administrative time savings

In our work, we have focused on direct savings from a reduction in administrative burden because those benefits are the most easily quantifiable; they’re easiest for both researchers and research administrators to relate to, and they align with established policy aims. However, the actual benefits of investing in PID-based infrastructure are likely far greater.

Evidence given to the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee in 2017 stated that every £1 spent on Research and Innovation in the UK results in a total benefit of £7 to the UK economy. The same is likely to be true for other countries, so the benefit to national industrial strategies of increased efficiency in research are potentially huge.

Going a step further, the universal adoption of the five priority PIDs would also enable institutions, companies, funders, and governments to make much better research strategy decisions. At the moment, bibliometric and scientometric analyses to support research strategy decisions are expensive and time-consuming; they rely on piecing together information based on incomplete evidence. By using PIDs for entities like grants, outputs, people, projects, and institutions, and ensuring that the associated metadata links to other PIDs, it’s possible to answer strategically relevant questions by simply extracting and combining data from PID registries.

Final thoughts

According to UNESCO, global spending on R&D has reached US$1.7 trillion per year, and with commitments from countries to address the UN sustainable development goals, that figure is set to increase. Given the size of that investment and the urgency of the problems we face, building and maintaining the research infrastructure makes sound sense. It will enable us to track, account for, and make good strategic decisions about how that money is being spent.


Phill Jones

About the Author

Phill Jones, Co-founder, Digital and Technology | MoreBrains Cooperative

Phill is a product innovator, business strategist, and highly qualified research scientist. He is a co-founder of the MoreBrains Cooperative, a consultancy working at the forefront of scholarly infrastructure, and research dissemination. Phill has been the CTO at Emerald Publishing, Director of Publishing Innovation at Digital Science and the Editorial Director at JoVE. In a previous career, he was a bio-physicist at Harvard Medical School and holds a PhD in Physics from Imperial College, London.

The MoreBrains Cooperative is a team of consultants that specialise in and share the values of open research with a focus on scholarly communications, and research information management, policy, and infrastructures. They work with funders, national research supporting organisations, institutions, publishers and startups. Examples of their open reports can be found here: morebrains.coop/repository



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