Agora, BRIDGE, COST, ERC, ESRC, FET, NIH - it is not trivial to keep an overview of public research funding in Switzerland and beyond. Therefore, the University of Fribourg has a service that helps researchers to obtain suitable funding. For some three years now, Julian Randall has been its head.

The main task of your service is counseling and mentoring. What do you do when researchers get in touch with you?
We usually start with a meeting, typically in our offices or at the researcher’s office. If the researcher is still exploring opportunities, we provide an overview of the sources of funding, with a focus on the most adapted sources. When the researcher has decided to which funding scheme they want to apply, we help them with the administrative aspects of the proposal as well as the financial details. We also offer in-depth review of the scientific research plan as well as training for the interviews necessary with certain prestigious grants. And for those researchers that do not get in touch, we have a number of proactive measures in order to reach out to them.

Compared to other universities, where is the biggest potential to be even more successful with bids?
The UNIFR success rate is either better or comparable to other Swiss universities with SNSF funding and is reasonably successful with European grants. However, there is always room for improvement. In general, UNIFR tends to obtain more funding of individual researchers than of collaborations, so being more active in consortium funding would be one avenue. There is also potential to improve the UNIFR capacity to retain researchers with the most prestigious grants. A number of these researchers have recently left UNIFR for other universities; we conclude that another avenue is ensuring that researcher conditions at UNIFR are attractive in the Swiss context. One contribution to that attractivity should be improved research database services that we are actively supporting.

How do you deal with the uncertain environment, keywords Brexit, mass immigration initiative, auto-determination initiative, limitation initiative, back and forth with Horizon 2020?
Uncertainty can hamper UNIFR success by simultaneously affecting the service and the researchers. The service must keep abreast of all new developments, particularly with the European Union, as well as communicate with the researchers and partners as soon as possible. The researchers may face a number of issues, from rumors up to being removed from a consortium. As an example of the effect such issues can have, Swiss researcher performance in European funding programmes was reduced in the aftermath of the 9th February 2014 mass immigration initiative. Whilst Switzerland has since regained the status it had before that date, further uncertainties need to be taken into account. Our service manages these uncertainties by keeping in close touch with peers and partners, such as the Swiss representatives in Brussels; our experience following the 9th February vote has taught us how we can support researchers should the funding landscape change rapidly.

Your service is also affected by the move towards open access and open data. The potential is supposed to be considerable. What do you tell young researchers to consider in terms of data before starting their research?
The main funding agencies, both in Switzerland and abroad, increasingly make open access a mandatory condition. Today research results must be published in open-access scientific journals; furthermore, the acquisition and storage of the data on which publications are based must be planned. We point this out to young (and older!) researchers. Whilst some scientific fields have been familiar with Open Data and Open Access for a long time, in others it is still quite new and therefore can present challenges. We help researchers obtain funds for their open-access publications and provide guidance when needed to prepare their data management plans.

Photo: Karl Kerschbaum