1. Luc Soete – Universiteit Maastricht 1 LUC SOETE MAASTRICHT UNIVERSITY Welcome

2. Luc Soete – Universiteit Maastricht 2 TNC2013 in Maastricht Welcome to all of you also on behalf of Maastricht University. TNC2013 is as you all know hosted by SURFnet, the Dutch National Research and Education Network. SURFnet has connected institutions in the Netherlands and the rest of the world via NetherLight (the international lightpath node in Amsterdam), AMS-IX (the world’s largest Internet node), and the pan-European GÉANT communications network. SURFnet has been instrumental over the last 25 years in developing Dutch e-infrastructure through a structural public funding commitment. In short, we, just like all other universities in The Netherlands, have become crucially dependent on SURFnet both for research and valorisation activities.

3. Luc Soete – Universiteit Maastricht 3 Globalisation of research The importance of global communication opportunities on the one hand and digital access on the other for research activities world- wide cannot be easily overestimated. It has become the basis of what has been called today Science 2.0 or e-Science. Let me quote the historical parable, Paul David and Dominique Foray presented some ten years ago… “Let us compare the experiences of two scholars: Rachid, a seventeenth century astronomer from the beautiful town of Fez, and Rachel, an imaginary young engineering postdoctoral student working in a Stanford University laboratory in the late twentieth century… Rachid invented a new telescope and wanted to transmit the details of his discovery to colleagues in Cordoba, Padua and Salamanca. This was an arduous task because this kind of knowledge had not yet been codified at the time and he had to copy all of his plans and notes by hand. Rachid then entrusted his precious documents to the northbound caravans, in the hope that they would one day be delivered to his colleagues.

4. Luc Soete – Universiteit Maastricht 4 Rachid and… “There was little certainty of that happening… More problematic are situations in which knowledge is basically memorized and passed on by word of mouth, because the circle of effective users remains confined to direct, personal contacts. Moreover, as that circle is widened, there is an increasing risk of the content becoming distorted in the course of oral transmission and successive copying. Only recurring communications back-and-forth among each of the pairs participating in such a network of transmission would operate to limit the propagation of "copying errors". The likelihood of that occurring, however, diminishes as the number of links in the human chain of communications increases. Hence, there are physical limitations preventing expansion of the community of people who can harness new knowledge, and possibly further improve upon Rachid's design. Knowledge flows have existed throughout history, but, as a rule, they have been few and far between and relatively feeble….“

5. Luc Soete – Universiteit Maastricht 5 Rachel “As for Rachel, let us say that she invented a small robot, working out the engineering details with the help of a computer-aided-design (CAD) program. Wishing to inform her community, she quickly produced the relevant documents and plans with the help of graphic design software. The files were then copied and dispatched as email attachments to a list of selected addresses. Within seconds, they were received by dozens of laboratories throughout the world and hundreds of researchers could begin reproducing the knowledge and sending back their comments, criticisms and suggestions. Knowledge codification and transmission costs here were very low (i.e. Rachel’s marginal costs of codifying and transmitting the knowledge in question, given the fixed infrastructure, and her training costs). So too were those of its reproduction. Indeed, this is the case when the invention itself remains within the framework of knowledge with which the community’s members are familiar: the people receiving the file have “learned to learn” this kind of knowledge and the attached document provides a detailed learning programme.” (David and Foray, 2002, p.6-7).

6. Luc Soete – Universiteit Maastricht 6 “Good science anywhere is good for science everywhere“ (Subra Suresh) The emergence of e-science (David Osimo): –New scientific outputs and players: nano-publications, data and code; vertical disintegration of the value chain –Greater role for inductive methods: everything becomes a Genome Project –Scaling serendipity: Big linked data, collaborative annotation, social networking and knowledge mining detect unexpected correlations on a massive scale –Better science: reproducible and truly falsifiable research findings; earlier uncovering of mistakes –More productive science: re-using data and products, crowd- sourcing work, reduce time-to-publication

7. Luc Soete – Universiteit Maastricht 7 Global/European societal challenges Research is itself confronted with a number of major challenges in various new areas such as climate change, human cognition, cells, the elementary structure of matter, language, social networks. Characteristically these areas are: –Fundamentally complex; –Available data are always “scarce”; –Further knowledge development involves the building up extremely large data sets; –Knowledge development requires inter-disciplinarity. Raises many global research policy challenges.

8. Luc Soete – Universiteit Maastricht 8 Global Research Policy Challenges Implies a shift from the national focus of “national” research councils such as NWO, ERC, NSF, NISTEP, STEPI, CAST towards a more Global Research Council structure? Global policy coordination will be essential... Science 2.0 as MOOR (Massive Online Open Research)? The heavily biased “long tail” output distribution of radical inventions with hundred years’ rate of return could be drastically brought back (see e.g. Bill Press keynote at 2013 AAAS meeting). Not all research data is the same but interoperability of data is more hampered by different “quality notions” of data across disciplines than accross countries. Brings me back to the central role of e-Infrastructure such as SURFnet

9. Luc Soete – Universiteit Maastricht 9 Thank you for your attention! Luc Soete Maastricht University l.soete@maastrichtuniversity.nl