In the framework of the event ‘Open Space for European Research’, both Liana Giorgi and Michael Schmidt received a distinction as “Austrian Champions in European Research” for their FP7 projects EURO-FESTIVAL and SITPRO+, respectively. This is surprising.

The surprise is not that the individuals got the distinction: both are internationally respected scientists with a longstanding experience in their fields. What is, however, surprising is that the conference accompanying the price award in fact excludes social sciences and humanities. Actually, there is not even much space for the “hard sciences”. Instead, the working groups deal almost exclusively with SMEs, medicine, and technology.

Hence, the question remains: do scientists not do research? This is certainly not the case at the European level, where the importance of science in general, and more particularly, of social and human sciences is underlined not just by speeches and communications, but by significant research budgets as well. This should have been noted by the organizers, the FFG (Austrian Research Promotion Agency) and the Austrian Research Dialogue, an initiative of the Austrian Ministry for Science and Research.

This is not because of lack of participation by the social science community. The FFG launched a call for proposals and concepts of workshops and working groups were submitted by the community. However, the proponents were not even informed about the decisions of the organizers – or, what might have been expected, at least thanked by the organizers for their efforts.

It is in this respect surprising that the Austrian SSH community is quite successful in the European Framework Programmes, as evidenced by the distinction of our two colleagues.

Ronald J. Pohoryles

We would like to use this opportunity to introduce to you our newest staff members:

Lines Friss Lindner joined the ICCR in fall 2007, she is currently working on the MONIQA project.

Fabian Rühle is a young research assistant, working on the ECO-BUILD project.

Jérôme Segal is senior researcher at the ICCR. He joined us in February 2008 and started working on the EURO-FESTIVAL project.

In January 2008, four new projects were launched at the ICCR. In the Alpine Traffic Management System project, co-ordinated by TNO Mobility and Logisitics in The Netherlands, the ICCR is partner together with Transport & Mobility Leuven.

The ICCR co-ordinates the Art Festivals and the European Public Culture (EURO-FESTIVAL) project, which runs for three years.

In the projects Raising citizens awareness and appreciation of EU research on sustainabletransport in the urban environment and Strengthening the role that Socio-economic Sciences and Humanities (SSH) have on the ERA Development the ICCR is also partner.