"A three-year international personnel exchange project that Korea had been conducting with the United Kingdom ended early after two years. In Germany, government policy also changes, but it is rare for a research project that is already under contract to be halted immediately just because of a change in administration."
Kim Rin-ho, Deputy Minister of the Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) Core Facility at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Germany, met with the joint reporting team of the Korea Science Journalists Association on the 13th (local time) in Munich, Germany, and pointed to policy volatility as a risk facing Korea's international science and technology cooperation. The Max Planck Society is a world-class basic science research organization where about 27,000 researchers work across 84 institutes throughout Germany, with an annual budget of about 4 trillion won, and it has produced 28 Nobel laureates to date.
Deputy Minister Kim said, "If we decide to start cooperation because the research topics match but the project suddenly falls through, it is not easy to restore the relationship afterward," and added, "If German researchers perceive Korea as a partner heavily influenced by politics and difficult to predict, they may not even start the next cooperation."
In response, Korean scientists in Germany are also playing the role of intermediaries who help each side understand the research cultures of Korea and Germany. In Germany, when a key person in charge goes on a long vacation, there is often no replacement, and email replies can be delayed from several weeks to several months. In Korea, which values swift processing of tasks, Germany's research administration can feel frustrating.
Meanwhile, Deputy Minister Kim also compared Germany's research institution system, which has clearly defined roles separate from domestic Government-funded research institute. The fields covered by domestic Government-funded research institute range widely from basic science to cutting-edge applied research. Basic research projects based on government contributions and commissioned projects from outside are mixed, and the proportions differ depending on the nature of each institution. There is a problem of personnel at Government-funded research institute frequently leaving for universities or corporations to secure research freedom or improve compensation.
Germany operates the Max Planck institutes, which are responsible for basic science, separately from the Fraunhofer institutes, which are applied research institutions tailored to industry demand. The Max Planck Society receives stable support for basic science research funding regardless of changes in administration. When the government provides the society with a broad budget framework, the society decides internally how to allocate and use it by institute. The approach is to recruit globally vetted scientists as institute directors and grant them considerable authority and autonomy in running their research organizations.
By contrast, the Fraunhofer Society receives about one-third of its total budget from the German government as basic operating funds, and the rest is covered by its institutes winning industry projects. The pressure to secure external projects is reflected in the organization's founding purpose and identity from the outset.
In this regard, Deputy Minister Kim noted that when phasing out the project-based system (PBS) domestically, the characteristics of each Government-funded research institute should be taken into account. PBS is a system in which researchers cover labor and research costs by winning external projects from the government or corporations.
She said, "Depending on the research field, it may be good or bad for the proportion of externally commissioned projects to increase," and added, "There will be limits to applying the same uniform standards to all institutions."