Welcome to Open Consortium

Welcome to Open Consortium. A little known fact to start of with: the European Commission currently funds basic biomedical research with approximately seven billion EUR per year. How is this money being spent? And how come nobody outside the scientific community knows about this?

To briefly answer the first question: The largest part of these funds are invested in collaborative research projects involving several laboratories based in different EU member states. These labs often have a common thematic research focus but complementary technical approaches.

The outcome of these collaborative projects often mark a significant advancement of science - made in Europe. How exactly this is achieved shall be the topic of later articles in this blog, including success stories European science funding has supported.

The latter questions has a straight forward answer. Obtaining European funding for research is prestigious and highly acknowledged within the scientific community. Then, why is it, that basically nobody knows about it outside the laboratories?

The European Commission apparently has a communication problem.

This initial post to our blog should serve to set the scope and to define the mission of Open Consortium: to improve the communication of consortia in the life sciences.

To find out how we want to achieve this and who we are have a look around our website and the team. Or just wait for future blogposts.