Research at Swedish universities and university colleges is funded in two different ways. There are direct government allocations, and then there are grants from external donors, like public research funding bodies, private foundations and the EU.
Katrine Riklund, Pro-Vice-Chancellor
Photo: Mattias Pettersson
In 2022, Umeå University received an impressive SEK 2.8 billion for its research and doctoral education (R&D), and SEK 2.1 billion for education at the first- and second-cycle level. Twenty per cent of resources for the latter came from external sources; for R&D, the figure was roughly fifty per cent.
External resources are usually awarded following an application process, whereby different universities' applications are compared to each other. The funding a university is awarded is an indicator of the quality and competitiveness of the research it conducts (or at least of the research it applies for external funding for).
For strategic reasons, the University Management always encourages researchers at Umeå University to apply for these competitive external resources. We continuously strive to improve the quality of our research, and know that certain factors help make us more competitive.Following up on research is not just about keeping track of research funding opportunities; it is also about checking whether we submit enough applications, making sure the support system we have in place helps researchers apply for resources, etcetera.
There are of course other factors than funding that affect the quality of our research, but I will not go into them in this blog post. Perhaps I can just mention that we are in the final stages of developing a quality-assurance system for our research and the planning of pilot analyses. More on this in a future blog post.
As external funding stands for more than half of the research funding Umeå University receives, we need to carefully track the allocation of it. The funding landscape is a bit of a mosaic: an analysis that the Government is currently undertaking revealed that more than 800 different calls were published over the course of just twelve months! The in-depth analysis that was presented to the University Board on 19 April shone a spotlight on some of the larger donors.
In our annual report, we were pleased to conclude that we received almost seven per cent more research funding in 2022 than in 2021. But this good news needs to be nuanced: almost all other universities experiences similar spikes in funding. It does not suffice to simply monitor the ups and downs of our own funding: we need to compare our situation with that of others. And then there is the fact that multiple donors have increased their funding pot. To truly comprehend our position, we thus need to analyse both how much funding we are awarded, and the share of the available funding that we manage to secure for ourselves through our applications.
Looking at our rolling average in three-year intervals revealed that we received more resources from the Swedish Research Council in the fields of medicine & health and humanities & social sciences in the most recent three-year period. However, the actual share of the Council's resources that we were awarded during that period dipped for these two fields. For science & technology and educational science, on the other hand, there was a slight increase. We received more resources from the Swedish Cancer Society, while our share there remained relatively stable. As for FORTE and Fortas, we unfortunately witnessed a negative development, both in terms of how much we received and in terms of our share compared to others. (We are still analysing how much we received from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, which mainly funds projects in the fields of medicine, technology and science, and the European Research Council.)
The analysis paints a broad picture of our position. To understand our true strengths and weaknesses, we are now analysing the data in greater detail at the faculty-, subject- and field of research-level.
The in-depth analysis of the external support we have attracted is one of the documents the Strategic Council for Research and Doctoral Education (FOSTRA) will be looking at during its Strategy Day in mid-June. The Council will discuss how we can keep improving the quality of our research, our competitiveness, and the overall profile of our university. The goal is to secure a larger share of the resources that Swedish universities compete for.
It is good news that we are witnessing a positive trend in terms of allocation, so my congratulations to all researchers who submitted strong applications! I would like to encourage everyone to keep applying and to help each other do so, for example by reading through your colleagues' applications, sharing tips and advice, and talking with the Research Support and Collaboration Office ahead of important application processes.
As our Vision states, we must take responsibility for the future, collaboratively develop knowledge, and nurture our competitive edge and pride. We need to raise the bar in terms of bringing home a larger share of the research funding that we compete for with other universities. Achieving that is perfectly possible: we simply need to get better at what we are already doing so well today. Keep developing research projects that have the potential to be both innovative and interdisciplinary. There are still so many unanswered research questions out there!