“EUPRO is the first systematic and standardized database to investigate project based R&D collaboration networks in Europe”, said Thomas Scherngell, senior scientist at the AIT Center for Innovation Systems & Policy, and coordinator of the central access manager to RISIS datasets.
EUPRO, in fact, is a core RISIS dataset providing cleaned and complete information both on R&D projects and on participants over long time periods. Data included in EUPRO are numerous: in total, the dataset comprises 96,674 projects and 526,564 participations. These projecs are funded under different public funding frames, including the EU Framework Programme (FP), but also EUREKA, COST and JTIs. Project informations include objectives and achievements, costs, total funding, start and end date, contract type, information on the call, those of participants are related to standardized name of the participating organisation, organisation type, and geographical location.
“EUPRO has been developed more than ten years ago at AIT. We have initially started to integrate FP projects, now comprising all projects and participants from FP1 to H2020” said Scherngell. “recently, we have added information about other European funding instruments, such as EUREKA, COST and selected Joint Technology Initiatives (JTIs)”
EUPRO data are on and from EU 28 Member States, 13 Associated countries (with science and technology cooperation agreements that involved contributing to the framework programme budget), 14 Third Countries (countries that are not Member States, nor associated countries), and International Cooperation Partner Countries.
It offers the access to high quality data on R&D projects funded by different European funders. The robustness of the dataset and its relevance for actual research issues of the field has been underlined by the number of transnational access requests and visits conducted in the first RISIS project, as well as by the number of international scientific publications that have used the dataset, exploring e.g. geographies and dynamics of R&D collaboration, or impacts of R&D funding on knowledge creation and innovation.
“EUPRO has been recently used intensively as a core facility in research activities that investigate structure, dynamics and impacts of project-based R&D collaboration, in particular to grasp and understand the development of the European Research Area (ERA). On the one hand, the integration of EUPRO within RISIS has been core to increase its scientific value for cross-dataset empirical analyses, and to be able to gain from RISIS developed facilities, such as geo–localisation tools, for the further advancement of EUPRO, on the other hand”.
With the RISIS harmonisation across actors (organisations), geography and topics, EUPRO offers substantial analytical possibilities to address questions on structure and dynamics of knowledge creation, networking patterns of organisations in R&D projects, or impacts of publicly funded R&D, among others.
“Over the coming two years we are implementing a new module of EUPRO, which is called NATPRO, facing increasing demand not only from research but also from policy, to look also at the national landscape”. With this new module, researchers will, for instance, be able to analyse complementarities between national and European R&D funding and differing resulting networks structures at the European vs. national level.
The full documentation of EUPRO is available on Zenodo space dedicated to RISIS project.
