Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 26th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview PhD pre-conference seminar Author(s) Tomas Michalek Comenius University Bratislava Slovakia Title Scientific Advice Platform at the Slovak Academy of Sciences File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Tomas Michalek Abstract The purpose of this paper is to show a specific process of the still ongoing institutionalisation of science advice to policy-making at the Slovak Academy of Sciences (SAS). Its beginnings, best practices and topics will be closely examined. The author will present what he believes are the important pre-conditions for a research institution such as SAS to start the process towards this direction in a very specific environment of Slovakia. First, the institutional background of SAS will be shortly described with an emphasis on its specificities, namely the organisation of its 50-like institutes which greatly influences a day-to-day work of this institution and has important say in how SAS functions and sets its priorities. SAS is a national institution which undertakes scientific research in Slovakia as an autonomous non-university research institution which is primarily funded from public funding. Against this background, the process of institutionalisation of scientific advice will be examined. In the author’s view, an important condition which needs to be met if such a process is to be successful is a personal engagement of the involved researchers who have to understand what the actual purpose of the whole scientific advice platform is. In other words, the ownership of the process. They have to see the added value of this process and be vested in it. These elements are especially important in a country with no such practice, as is Slovakia. Without the proper understanding and involvement the whole process of scientific advice will not be working. Third element in this process is a recognition of the international community which is already active in this area. Several pilot projects, which the Scientific Advice Platform (SAP) started with, have had an international partner involved. Officially, the process started and was based on the EASAC Guidelines, meaning the membership in the European Academies' Science Advisory Council (EASAC) played a crucial role in embedding the SAP in an ongoing practice. Another example is a Horizon 2020 project named CIMULACT (Citizens and Multi-Actor Consultation on Horizon 2020), which is a spill-over project of the FP7 project named PACITA (Parliaments and Civil Society in Technology Assessment), which was an initiative of the EPTA (European Parliamentary Technology Assessment) network, which includes several European institutions doing Technology Assessment. And technology assessment is a practice which involves several aspects of scientific advice. Still, another pilot project of SAP has involved the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) through his initiative called Science Meets Parliaments. With a help of JRC an expert panel was organised in the Slovak National Parliament in October 2016. Thanks both to the international partner and personal engagement, the chairman of the Parliamentary Committee for Education welcomed this initiative and promised to further push for similar activities in the Parliament. To conclude with, the author will show how the specificity of institutional background in SAS and Slovakia, personal involvement of particular researchers (research managers) and recognition of the international community has influenced (and is still influencing) the process of establishing a functional science advice mechanism in Slovakia and how these elements are key for any furthering of this practice.
