The official withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union on the 31st January 2020 is likely to cause many changes to life on both sides of the divide, but nowhere is this rupture more vividly felt than in the scientific community, who were particular concerned about the impact on the Horizon 2020 research framework.

New research from the American Institute of Physics explores how the potential removal of UK research institutions is affecting three specific Horizon 2020 programs: Industrial Leadership, Societal Changes, and Excellent Science.

“Brexit is an unprecedented perturbation of a research and development collaboration network,” the authors say. “The departure of a large number of institutions from a single country that is one of the research and innovation leaders cannot be compared to any other situation in the modern history of research.”

Complex networks

Research networks are inherently complex, and the researchers wanted to test how sensitive they might be to the random deletion of certain nodes, as opposed to the targeted deletion of specific nodes, which the researchers regard the Brexit decision as being.

The networks were assessed for their global efficiency, ie their ability to facilitate connections, and their local efficiency, ie their ability to allow local neighbors in the network to collaborate and effectively share information.

“When large-scale networks are examined in detail, it is common to find modular organization, the grouping of institutions into modules or communities, and make a mesoscopic analysis,” the researchers explain. “The European network seems very robust in its mesoscale organization, with the exception of the Excellent Science program, for which the leave of U.K. institutions yields a reorganization of the largest collaboration clusters.”

The assessment used a range of centrality measures, such as the distance between local neighbors (and their relative importance), their position in the path between other organizations.  These were used to determine the connectedness of each organization in the network, and their subsequent role in both the formation of new projects, and collaborations within them.

The analysis revealed a reduction in global efficiency when the UK’s institutions were removed from the network, with a particular impact on the Excellent Science program.  This was due to the high centrality of UK institutions in the network.  The impact of Brexit in terms of local efficiency was less prominent, suggesting that local collaboration efforts will endure after Brexit.