Objectives

The Observatory of S&T will be geared toward understanding the state of research and technological cooperation between the EU and the MPC countries. It will focus on the establishment of standard indicators for these purposes, to be used for the MoCo to support their recommendations. It will maintain a database on scientific production of the cooperation. It will engage in analysis of the dynamics of research system. The outcomes should feed and be fed by the other WPs of MIRA on a regular basis.

Description of work

The first main task is the compilation and/or production of standard S&T indicators on research cooperation and innovation in the Mediterranean Area.

Activities:

• Issuing recommendations for specific indicators units along international standards in recollecting and using statistical information;
  
• create statistical indicators on S&T activities in MPC;
  
• create indicators on impact measurement;
  
• organisation of three workshops to agree the above mentioned indicators; the first meeting was held in Bondy, France, in 2009;  the second meeting in Beirut in June 2011, and the 3rd meeting in Tunis.
  
• organisation of a Seminar for Training MPC experts in the use of these indicators;
  
• organisation of a workshop with innovation survey managers to support exploitation, dissemination and use of results;
  
• promote guidelines for the collection and use of data, assuring comparability and cohesiveness of data;
  
• creation of a network on S&T indicators in the Mediterranean Partners Countries geared at interconnecting these units created or under creation, disseminating common standards and training specialists on such fields as bibliometrics, funding and manpower indicators dedicated to research;
  
• dynamic indicators and studies of the innovation systems.

The second main task is feeding of the Observatory with data and analysis of the Mediterranean countries participation in EU projects.

Activities:

• Analysis of former and current participation of Mediterranean countries in European projects in order to identify difficulties, administrative hurdles, opportunities, and best practices in the Mediterranean countries-MS cooperation;
  
• compilation and comparative analysis of Mediterranean countries S&T cooperation activities among themselves, with EU partners and with the rest of the world.

The third main task is the analysis of the Innovation data sources (survey) in the Mediterranean and technical support to Innovation surveys.

The fourth task is the measure of the impact.

Activities:

• Propose impact measure metric of the S&T cooperation activities in the Mediterranean.
  
• Report on Scientific Cooperation impact on RTD in the MPC.
  
• Feeding information to the activities of WP8 EMIS;
  
• seminar on science, technology and innovation policy and research in what is usually named the field of science studies and research aimed at linking science to society.