A sum of €8 million transferred by the government last week to the Ministry of Education, Science, Research and Sport’s research and development budget chapter will be allocated to the Slovak Academy of Sciences (SAV), according to the agreement reached between SAV officials and Education Minister Peter Pellegrini at the SAV gremium talks October 21.
Pellegrini promised SAV chair Jaromír Pastorek to allocate resources equalling €8 million to academic research via the science grant agency VEGA.
“It is, for instance, VEGA projects, Slovak Language Lexicon, SIVVP project or the project of the so-called supercomputer and Encyclopedia Beliana that will receive the financial support,” said Pellegrini, as quoted by the TASR newswire.
The financial resources in question are to cover the period of 2015, with SAV set to transform into a public research institution in 2016. The minister listed among priorities addressing of specialised research challenges, publication of research results and also the elimination of redundancies in terms of research projects and job descriptions in research and education fields.
In the past week, SAV researchers voiced their displeasure with the budget draft for next year that slashes funding for the institution by 16.9 percent on an annual basis. As a result, the scientists were planning to continue to denounce the budget, which they said may trigger SAV’s collapse – and they were not ruling out organising protests.
On October 14, the Education Ministry deemed the organising of protests as premature. The government was expecting to raise the ministry’s budget for science by another €8 million.
“What we need to do now is decide, along with SAV’s leadership, as to how the individual projects will be funded," ministry spokeswoman Beáta Dupaľová Ksenzsighová said.
The governmental draft budget allocated €50.5 million for SAV for 2015, which is a decline against this year in €10.3 million.
SAV head Jaromír Pastorek said, as quoted by the SITA newswire, that they agreed with the Education Ministry at the SAV gremium that it is necessary to boost the competitive resources, and to use the money for meaningful projects after an agreement with ministry.
(Source: TASR, SITA)
Compiled by Zuzana Vilikovská from press reports
The Slovak Spectator cannot vouch for the accuracy of the information presented in its Flash News postings.
