SCIENCE:THERE IS some very clever thinking apparent in the newly-published report on how to provide a career structure for our research scientists, writes DICK AHLSTROM

The report also shows how our existing research funding system can produce unwanted impacts, which a proper career structure should help to address.

The Advisory Science Council appointed a task force on researcher careers to help develop a strategy. It hired Technopolis Ltd to conduct a study, develop ideas and examine best practice based on what was happening abroad.

The resulting report makes for interesting reading. While it welcomes the huge increase in the amount of public and private funding flowing into research, it identifies a number of problems arising because of this cash.

One is a bulge in the numbers of researchers resident in our third level institutions. They enter their host university or institute on the back of three or five year research funding, but what to do with them once the project funds are used up? Too many now languish with single-year renewable contracts which do not give them any assurances about the future.

Another difficulty is researcher mobility. Everyone agrees that PhDs and post-doctorate students benefit greatly from spending time abroad, gaining experience and building research contacts that may serve later in their careers.

The plentiful research funding seems, however, to be discouraging their departure, the Council's report finds. There are good research jobs here, so why travel abroad?

Not so very long ago, of course, Irish scientists had far more mobility than they wanted, more or less being forced to leave due to the lack of funding and research posts.

Then there is the ongoing difficulties related to movement of PhDs and senior researchers out of the higher education sector and into enterprise.

The current Government strategy for a knowledge economy assumes that staff and ideas will move out of the lab and into business. However, what researcher in a cosy, well-funded lab wants to venture out into the chill commercial climate blowing these days?

They raised - yet again - our inability to see enough women gain roles as senior professors in higher education. Women account for only 8 per cent of full professors and just 12 per cent of associate professors in our universities and institutes, according to the most recent figures from 2003/04.

I have heard it argued that because there are fewer women in the lower ranks there are fewer later on to make a bid for these senior positions.

However, figures from the late 1990s showed that more than half of PhD awards went to women and more than 40 per cent of PhD-qualified researchers were women, the Council report says.

The Council offers ideas to find a way around these problems, based on creating a well-defined career structure for graduates entering the research system here.

In effect it would lead to the "professionalisation" of research careers.

It argues that such a system would be highly competitive to ensure quality, transparent to eliminate cronyism and peer reviewed to guarantee best practice.

It would also facilitate the free movement of the researcher between higher education institutions, the public sector, private companies and also internationally.

One radical suggestion involves allowing funding agencies to facilitate inward and outward mobility by continuing to finance researchers seeking international experience, but also helping those who decide it is time to return home.

The Council proposes a "careers competency framework" that would define skills sets and enable an objective measure of capacities, something it believes would help foster better mobility between the academic, public and private sectors.

This would allow a PhD graduate, with an initial post-doctoral research contract good for four years, to be followed by designation as a research fellow and be able to bid independently for his or her own research funding.

These fellows could in time then apply for academic posts as "senior research fellows", receiving contracts of indefinite duration, subject to the availability of funding.

On the question of women in science, the Council calls for programmes to ensure that Ireland reaches the EU average of 15 per cent for women achieving positions at senior academic level. Ironically, the 2006 EU report, Women and Science, Statistics and Indicators expresses itself as dissatisfied with this participation rate.

Will any of these ideas be pursued? They must be, according to Prof Delores Cahill who led the task force that produced the report. Failure would thwart our march towards a knowledge economy and prevent our researchers from reaching their full potential.