Developing and Using Indicators of Multilateral S&T Cooperation for Policy Making: The Experience from European Research Programmes

As European Union research programmes play an increasingly important role within the research and innovation systems of Member States, the need for appropriate indicators to grasp and analyze this collaborative phenomenon has in recent years become obvious. Such indicators are becoming essential decision-making tools for science policy makers at the national level. EU science policy responds to not one but a number of objectives, while one country or one laboratory's participation in European S&T cooperation is likely to manifest a number of particularities, and be quite different from another's. Such a complex system makes it possible to elaborate a large variety of indicators. This article proposes several possible types of indicators and shows how they could be useful for weighing research policy strategies at the national and European levels.