Introduction

Last July we thought we survived an unpleasant merging attempt (related rumours quenched after three days), and we hoped the era of reform attempt of research organizations, made without consultation of the scientific community, and surreptitiously inserted in law norms of other nature, was over, as well as the publication of leaks and rumours on the action of the present Cabinet (not like the 2010 one).

Instead here we go again on October 10 ...

 

Antefacts

The immediate antefacts, beyond those recalled in the July note (among which the evalutation procedure of the research organizations VQR 2004-2010 is still in progress), are

• that all research organization did their duty submitting the plans requested by the Government for the spending review
• that in particular INAF was further considering the possibility to merge some of its institutes colocated in the same city (Milan, Palermo and Bologna, after similar operations done in Rome and Turin)
• that (with the incurable optimism of a dodo?) INAF was also considering the possibility of National Laboratories

... i.e. everybody thought we could go on with business as usual.

And instead on October 10 there are rumours that the Stability Law (the current name of the Budget Law) would contain a new reform, not a marginal one, but the merging of all research organizations into a single one !

Unlike my previous documents (2010 and 2012) this time it is worth to attempt a synopsis also of unofficial drafts, which will be done further below. But beofre, at least for the unknowledgeable reader, I remind the frequency of the attempts of reform of research organizations in remote and recent history.

 

Remote antefacts

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Recent antefacts

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A diachronic synopsis

Unlike what done in the past, this time I take into account not only the bill submitted to the Parliament (and the subsequent iter) but also the various drafts circulated on the press and on the web, and I attempt a synoptic comparison. This might be useful to understand the intents of the author/s.

• on October 10 on the net appears a draft of the stability law, which, even if it anticipates norms later mantained, does not consider at all the research organizations
• on October 11 the Sole 24 Ore (newspaper of Confindustria, the main entrepreneur union) publishes a draft of art. 11 (with a detailed breakdown into more than 50 catches);
  such draft is not considered official and is not shown to the presidents of the research organizations by the minister (public memo n. 10 of INAF president)
  soon there is a plethora of comments on various blogs like Battiston's, the INFN one, (which since this time and for the next days records also comments from the press and from politicians, some really surprising for their interest in research !), ROARS and the same MIUR (Ministry of Education, University and Research)
• the next days there are denial rumours
• on October 14 the INAF president, in his public memo n. 11, reports about an exchange of opinions with the minister (reported here)
• on October 15 sources like the INFN blog report a different draft in 5 articles
• on October 16 the public memo n. 12 of INAF president contains a virtually final draft
• at the same time the Government web site releases an official version
  (noteworthy that on the day it shows up, it does not appear in a patent place on the home page but has to be found with some difficulty on the site map, under "Notizie da Palazzo Chigi" finally reaching here. Note also the site contains a disclaimer: "The Presidency of the Council of Ministers states that any rumour on the contents of the stability law, currently under discussion in the Council of Ministers, is destitute of foundations, even if originating from Ministers or Undersecretaries, even if during radio or TV broadcasts.")

I proceed with the comparison of the Sole 24 ore draft, the 5-article draft from the INFN blog, the "virtually final draft" and the version on the Government website.
The actual comparison is amoung three items, since the final draft attached to memo 12 is identical to the one on the INFN blog.

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Besides the curious fact that the Sole 24 Ore draft talked of possibility di rinnovo and of society a prevalente partecipazione (with English endings in Italian, maybe one of the authors was not of italian mother tongue ?) one notes what follows:

• there is obviously a permanent will to merge (see the rewriting of catch 6), which originarily extended partially even beyond the framework of the organizations under MIUR surveillance..
• the two Agencies have disappeared. Rather inexplicably they incorporated also two "proper", although peculiar, research organizations. Instead ASI, being exactly a funding agency (rather sui generis as research organization), would have fitted rather nicely (despite the perplexity raised by the denomination of the funding agency as "of european and international research", when on one hand often european research obtains funds from the European Union, and on the other hand ASI funds finance also national space programs).
• It is not clear why, among the modifications of the legislative decree "on the autonomy of organizations" (DL 213 2009), only one remains, namely the one on scientific councils. Moreover it is curious that now the ministry wants that the president of each organization chair the scientific council, contrary to the observations of MIUR to the statute drafts when MIUR objected to the organizations which were foreseeing it, requesting them to have an indpendent chairman for the scientific council.
   
  
• For what concerns national habilitation this could be positive since it treats the research staff of the organizations as university professors. There are however perplexities, since the operation is delicate and is therefore important not to make mistakes.
  • the implementation of the national habilitation for universities is highly criticized (see e.g. ROARS)
  • the national habilitation for universities concerns only progressions to the ranks of associate and full professor. It is unclear how it can be applied to recruitment into the initial level of research staff of PROs.
  • habilitation would be a necessary but not sufficient condition for progression (or recruitment), in lack fo the necessary funds
  • does the ministry intend to apply the habilitation to all research organizations or only to those under surveillance of MIUR ?
  • while bibliometric criteria would be of rather easy application e.g. to an homogeneous sector like astrophysics (eventually using ADS instead of a commercial service), it is totally unclear how to handle the case (or the several different cases) of technologists (and particularly the anomalous cases of "administrative-technologists", see further below)
  • interactions between habilitation and current contest (examination) procedures are unclear (also because some details are ruled by internal regulations, other by trade union labour agreements, and other by earlier labour agreements with the status of Decree of the President of the Republic)
  
   
  
• Note also that, independently from the iter of the law, the Minister has already created the Consultative Council of Presidents with own decree 20199 of October 4 (such Committee is actually wider, including also the President of CRUI - the university rector conference - and some high ministerial functionaries).

 

From announcement to reality

Now we can stop with an academic comparison among the presumed intents of the unknown ministerial editors of the law drafts, and concentrate on the version submitted to the Parliament, the one to be approved and to subsequent developments.
It is in fact clear that the Consultative Council of Presidents (hopefully with the support of the scientific staff of the organizations) will have to make their own proposals of rationalization, trying to contain damages and exploit best opportunities.

 

Parliamentary iter

The bill has been filed at the Chamber of Deputies as AC 5534 (PDF, or in HTML). Its iter can be followed on the Parliament web site

The Budget Committee in its session of October 17 has noted that several norms do not adequately fit into the stability law, among which art. 11 which is an "ordering norm", and therefore the iter had an anomalous conclusion by excerpt deliberated on 18 october 2012.
The actual stability law continues as 5534-bis, while among excerpted text the bill originating from art. 11 is AC 5534-quinquies decies

watch this space  

Which are the research institutions ?

Frankly speaking, it is not clear to me why there is such an emphasis on rationalization and merging of the research organizations under MIUR surveillance, while it is rather the global situation of all other research organizations to be confused.

A good question is in fact which and how many are the research organisations. Despite good will an answer is not easy. In fact

• It is known that among the organizations included in the Research Compartment (for labour agreement purposes) there are organizations under the surveillance of MIUR and other under surveillance of other ministries
• It is known without doubt which are the 12 MIUR-related organizations (see this official list)
• I did not manage instead to find a comprehensive list of all organizations in the Research Compartment (with a common national labour agreement) neither in the laws nor on the website of ARAN.
• Compare instead these lists:
  • in an ISTAT documentS/a> the National Statistics Institute lists 33 of them (included the 12 above)
  • in a list mantained by CINECA for MIUR, divided by ministry, there are 49 listed (excepted consortia and special institutes)
  • in a list mantained by a trade union there are 32 (included 11 of the 12 MIUR-related ones)
  • another list can be found on the CRUI site
  Note how lists are heterogeneous (sometimes they list local bodies or foundations not part of public administration) and clearly not up to date (showing up organizations recently suppressed or merged), but are anyhow indicative of a situation much more complex than the one of those under MIUR.

If an important rationalization has to be done, I think it should concern more the other research organizations, rather than the 12 under MIUR surveillance. For the latter only few simple interventions concentrated in particular cases might suffice.

 

A propositive approach

The document by Sirilli on ROARS has already attempted an accounting of possible savings (limited in amount, but after all "showing an image") due to the decrease of the number of presidents and members of the administration boards in case of merging of institutions. Therefore I would not attempt similar computations, please refer to the Sirilli paper.

I try instead to give a synoptic summary of some other characteristics of the 12 organizations under MIUR surveillance (listed in decreasing order of funding for 2011 according to the MIUR site).

if anybody has more accurate date available, useful to complete missing values, please let me know so that I can update the table expand details hide details

From the above tale is apparent that the nature and characteristics of the "institutions" under MIUR surveillance is rather heterogeneous:
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So a first part of the propositive approach would be to define an optimal-size research organization, tipically monodisciplinary and distributed on the national territory, leaving alone the organizations already matching such model, while rendering the other ones uniform and consistent with such model.

A second part could recover the funding agency, but such matter is delicate and should be considered carefully in its several details.

A third part concerns national habilitation, which was mentioned further above, hilighting areas worth of a cautious approach.

Catch 3 of art. 11 in the original bill lists some saving-oriented items in the spending review style:
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Also I do not understand why this trend to saving is not brought further forward. I would be naive, but I never understood why to make the "payroll" for the staff of a research institution one needs a lot of administrative staff instead of an essentially automatic piece of software. Nor why one needs such a long time to issue a vacancy announcement for a job, and why each institution does it in different ways, sometimes even with the publication of the announcements decentrated to the local seats.
A reasonable proposal would be an unified agency or service for administrative support for all research organizations which could take over all sorts of standard bureaucratic activities.
This way it would be possible to gradually reduce (with a selective block of turnover) the "general" administrative staff (in favour instead of technical staff needed for support to research, or to local administrative staff also acting as support to research, researchers and projects).

Coming to the main argument of the pretended cost savings, i.e. to the organisms of the institutions and to the emoluments of their members, it would be difficult to cut on accounting auditors as well as on organization presidents (considering that a president must usually move to another city, and necessarily receive an allowance allowing to mantain two homes ... the alternative would be an itinerating president office relocated to the institute of origin of the president pro tempore, which would not cost less).
It is however possile to obtain a saving on the members of the administration board, on one hand with the provision that such charge is assigned exclusively to internal members (staff or associated of the institution) and be honorary (except only the refund of travel expenses), on the other hand renouncing to the mantra of function separation between administration board and scientific council, having a single scientific and administration council (or attributing the functions of administration board to an executive subset of the scientific council).

While considering as non renounciable conditions the statutory autonomy of each organization and the disciplinary specific characteristics of each of them, it would be possible to consider some form of coordination for common rules and regulations.

• the statutes of the organizations could share a common template, based on the better and more open norms for what representativity is concerned, chosen among existing statutes (e.g. INAF and/or INFN). A statute could not be more restrictive, ma potrebbe adottare norme piu' aperte. but should be allowed to adopt more open norms.
• The accounting and administration regulation could be unique for all organizations, or based on a set of common norms, integrated by some specific for the particular organization
• The operational regulation, as well as the bylaws on contests or on post-doc grants or on missions could also be unique for all organizations or based on common norms integrated by specific ones.
• The regulation for internal arrangement of each organization should be necessarily specific for each one (given that e.g. the internal articulation in sections or structures is historically different).

The common regulations could be prepared under the responsibility of the consultative council of presidents, perhaps extended to a representative of the staff for each organization or deferred to an adhoc committee nominated by the presidents, and/or with a stage of compulsory consultation of the research staff.

 

Conclusions

While it is clear that the insertion of norms about a reform of research organizations in the stability law was irritual, it is equally clear there is a will of the Government and/or the Minister to proceed anyhow. It is therefore important that the scientific coomunity keep eyes open, and be available to raise constructed proposals to defend our own legitimate interests.  

Disclaimer

Opinions expressed herein are the author's own and do not represent a commitment by, nor are official opinions of, IASF Milano or INAF