Happy 50th Birthday to Europe

It will not have escaped anyone’s attention that the European Union recently celebrated its 50th anniversary, issuing the Berlin Declaration to mark the occasion - so now, confusingly, we have two Berlin Declarations, in case you’ve forgotten about the other one…  A good time to highlight the new Erawatch service, sponsored jointly by European Commission and the Community Research and Development Information Service (CORDIS).  Erawatch is intended to "support policy making in the research field in Europe. Its objective is to provide knowledge and a better understanding of national and regional research systems and of the environment in which they operate."

So it provides a rather useful and well-structured portal for finding out about European R&D activities by country, programme, theme, policy priorities etc, and - importantly in light of the byzantine nature of the EU infrastructure - unearthing a wide variety of relevant documentation in one go.  There’s a rather clever-looking Research Inventory Service which describles EU-wide and national policy and environments with regards to R&D.  It’s all well worth putting it to the test (but I’m quite prepared to be proved wrong…).

At a more basic level, a useful introduction to more general EU resources comes courtesy of Freepint’s latest newsletter, with a feature on ‘Finding facts: the EU after 50 years’.  In particular, it provides a lot of links to European sources of information, particularly legal and business services.