In my previous blog post I listed a number of countries which are expecting to join the Horizon Europe research and innovation programme, one of them being Australia. Why Australia? In this edition, we are going to look at what Australia has to offer and at the current state of affairs between the UK and Australia with regards to R&I.

To begin with, Australia has a strong reputation for science, research and higher education. With a global population share of 0.33%, Australia produces 3.3% of the world’s scientific publications. However, with a constant spend in recent years of 1.8% of its GDP on research and development, Australia falls below the OECD average of 2.3%. Besides, during the past decade, Australia’s government investment in science and innovation has been steadily in decline and in 2023 has reached its lowest point ever. Presently, Australia’s research strategy is influenced by a general sense of being in a global innovation race and needing to take immediate actions to increase its performance.

The UK is Australia’s 3rd international collaborator by co-authored research outputs. To date, collaboration between the UK and Australia has mostly taken place on a small scale, at researcher-to-researcher level. However, since Australia has become a key partner country for the UK’s International Science Partnership Fund, we are expecting funding agencies on both sides to create more opportunities for joint projects. This idea has been recently reinforced by the Australia-UK Free Trade Agreement which stipulates an active collaboration in innovation between the two parties.

Whilst this is exciting news and sounds promising, we would also like to know where the funds are and how we can access them. We should not be surprised to find out that the above-mentioned programme does not have anything on the table right now. At this point, it is obvious that if we still want to collaborate with Australian partners, we have to look for other funding sources. 

The RIS International Collaboration intranet page provides a good overview of Australia’s research landscape, including insights into some of its main funding organisations and schemes for international collaboration.