In this period there has been much attention in discussing the setting up by the Ministry of Education of an agency, Anvur, intended to evaluate the scientific results of the various Italian research groups. There is no doubt about the importance of this activity, as indeed the 2003 Group (group of the most cited researchers in the world literature) has indicated in its constituent Manifesto and reaffirmed on several occasions.
It is right to go back to rewarding merit, but this merit must be evaluated considering that in Italy, unlike other countries, there are unequal conditions of competition and scarcity of available resources. The merit certainly depends on the intellectual and organizational capacities of the individual researchers, but also and above all on the institutional context within which they operate. In fact, the research product is almost always the result of group activity and of the available funding which is often conditioned by distortion factors.
There are those who have been favored by winking at parties, those who have had ad hoc laws made, those who can participate in calls for tenders and those who have been excluded, there are those who have made a fortune by linking themselves to the world of industry, who has made debts which are then paid by public funds, who has been favored by direct financing and who benefits from the advantage of belonging to power groups.
It is true that merit counts in the end, but an analysis of how this has been achieved cannot be ignored. Furthermore, the right attention to evaluation should be accompanied by the availability of adequate resources and not by cuts.
Instead, exactly the opposite happens: it's like going to evaluate how someone in poverty spends their money. It is always worth remembering that this government, called upon to deal with a very serious financial emergency, in the limited time of its operations has failed, like the rest of its predecessors, to devote the attention it deserved to research.
Our research spending has continuously decreased and is currently well below half the European average; the number of researchers is continuously decreasing also due to a consistent emigration with scarce returns and it should therefore not be surprising that we are recovering from the European competition
