To discuss with colleagues the importance of internationalisation for scientific work \u2013 be it at the level of money, information, personnel, experts, or the formation of consortia \u2013 would be like the proverbial taking of owls to Athens. But unfortunately, I know from my own experience that not all administrative staff of the co-recipients quite understand the importance of internationalisation, starting from the content of scientific work all the way to its impact on reputation.\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n
We sometimes encounter even almost surreal administrative barriers, for instance with contracting international colleagues, especially if they come from non-EU countries. Yes, it is a fact that different countries have different regulations and even European legislation can be rather challenging. Still, the quality of administrative support, willingness, and ability to find a way in this area does widely vary among co-recipients. It depends on the local interpretation of rules, the level of professionalism, subjective approach, or looking for excuses. In short, the approach can vary significantly, from top-notch helpfulness all the way to obstructionism.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Already the initial documentation of the Ministry of Education of the Czech Republic for the public tender of EXCELES R&D programme clearly called for implementation of numerous internationalising parameters and definition of their indicators. Previous extensive international experience was also one of the qualifying \u2018inclusion criteria\u2019 for key personages and heads of research teams of the National Institute of Cancer Research (NICR). We have thus not only \u2018formally rephrased\u2019 our qualifications to suit the remand for international impact: for us, the internationalising aspects are above all a factual, highly positive, and most welcome strategic element that naturally and inherently permeates our project activities. An international dimension is a necessary precondition of successful completion of our projects.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n What did the individual partners, to various extent, commit themselves to:<\/span><\/p>\n Our administrators regularly summarise how well we actually fare at meeting the mandatory indicators. On the NICR website, we can see how our colleagues manage to publish in international teams, how they are placed in authorship teams, and whether the papers are mainly \u2018domestic\u2019 or primarily delivered by the foreign research institution. Each of these alternatives means something slightly different but all are good. And aside from the results as such, they also indicate the long-term trends and tell us something about the foundation of reputation of individual teams on the virtual map of \u2018institutions of international note\u2019.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Another piece of good news is the conclusion of two memoranda about cooperation: between the NICR and Dana Farber Cancer Institute and between NICR and the Institute of Virology of the University Hospital Cologne. In both cases, this is not just a formality: both agreements are based on existing and provable cooperation that is most likely to lead to further tangible results. Moreover, we know that further such agreements are in the works.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Several research teams of the NICR have welcomed new colleagues from abroad. Five teams have been created anew, solely thanks to NICR support, and based on an international call and selection of team members. One of these teams, created at the Institute of Biochemistry and Experimental Oncology of the First Faculty of Medicine around a junior researcher who had returned from abroad where he worked for several years at various institutes, is composed only from foreigners, from postdocs to doctoral students. And, by the way, the abovementioned doctoral students are in the study programme <\/span>Experimental and clinical oncology<\/span><\/a> at the Charles University, one of two in whose accreditation for instruction in both Czech and English NICR had participated.<\/span><\/p>\n Our <\/span>Czech Annual Cancer Research Meeting<\/span><\/a> (CACR), which presents the results of (not only) NICR members, will take place this year again in Olomouc and host a number of international speakers, including Jonathan S. Duke-Cohen from\u00a0Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Viktor Umansky from the German Cancer Research Center, or Jind\u0159ich Kope\u010dek from the University of Utah. This will be accompanied by an in-person meeting of the <\/span>International Supervisory and Advisory Board<\/span><\/a>, which is an important supervisory organ but also a source of inspiration since it is composed of important and renowned, mainly international, senior scientists. We also co-organise <\/span>summer schools<\/span><\/a>, which are, naturally, international not only in terms of lecturers but also other participants.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Aside from meeting the \u2018output\u2019 indicators, our perception of internationalisation of NICR has a yet further ambition. As we understand it, sustainability of the NICR is supported, among other things, by international partnerships at the level of individual institutes or even among analogical distributed national or supranational centres that bring together important academic centres of cancer research abroad. Broader awareness of NICR is moreover boosted by the individual reputation of our colleagues across the NICR nodes. Those who over and above the requirements of their own excellent research invest energy in \u2018world science\u2019, for instance by participating in executive organs of supranational scientific societies, boards, by organising important international conferences, and the like. Another initiative aimed at increasing awareness of these activities, both externally and internally, is the newly created <\/span>catalogue of NICR research groups<\/span><\/a>, which is accessible on our website.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" To discuss with colleagues the importance of internationalisation for scientific work \u2013 be it at the level of money, information, personnel, experts, or the formation of consortia \u2013 would be like the proverbial taking of owls to Athens. But unfortunately, I know from my own experience that not all administrative staff of the co-recipients quite understand the importance of internationalisation, starting from the content of scientific work all the way to its impact on reputation.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[100,78,87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3064","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2024-3","category-newsletter-inscider-en","category-scitopic-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nuvr.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3064","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nuvr.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nuvr.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nuvr.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nuvr.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3064"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.nuvr.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3064\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3375,"href":"https:\/\/www.nuvr.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3064\/revisions\/3375"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nuvr.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nuvr.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nuvr.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}An international dimension already in the foundations of the NICR<\/b><\/h4>\n
\n
International cooperation and publications<\/b><\/h4>\n
International teams<\/b><\/h4>\n
An international conference<\/b><\/h4>\n
International partnership and reputation<\/b><\/h4>\n