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2012/SOM1/HRDWG/028rev1

Agenda Item: Special Session 3.3

Strengthening Academic and Research Cooperation of APEC Economies Through the Networking

Purpose: Consideration

Submitted by: Russia

/ 34thHuman Resources Development Working Group Meeting Moscow, Russia
5-10February 2012

1. Our first initiative concerns the establishment of APEC Network University. We have studied carefully both the APEC activities in the field of education and the experience of several existing network universities (such as University of Arctic, NIS Network University, SCO University, and ASEAN University Network).

We believe that it is now possible to discuss practical steps towards establishing APEC Network University.

Its main idea is to promote a maximum mobility for students, as well as availability of information about existing programs and courses and a system of their independent evaluation and international accreditation.

Similarly, such a university would promote the mobility of professors. It would also become a platform for cooperative research and development projects, putting databases together and creating pools of collectively used equipment.

Network University must be a decentralized institution with a representative international governing body, and programs, centers and offices distributed among different locations. For example, one of the participant universities would have the coordinating bureau for cooperative research, another - the Experiment and Development Center, the third one the quality assessment office and so on.

We suggest that the educational, research and academic activities of the Network University should be concerned primarily with postgraduate studies, that is, Master and Doctor Study programs. At first we could choose several programs that would be of interest to all participants. ManyuniversitieshavebilateralagreementsconcerningMasterprograms. So by joining forces we could form the first version of university network.

Simultaneously, rules and procedures that would enable other universities to join the network at willshould be agreed upon.

I think that we could start with a relatively small consortium of partner universities that would form a core of future APEC Network University. For example, Association of Pacific Rim Universities (APRU) could become such a core. We have had a preliminary discussion with Secretary General of the Association, Dr. Christopher Tremewan, and he gave us his support.

2. The second initiative is to create a process that would enable financing of international research programs as a part of APEC priorities. This suggestion is partly based on the initiative of Russian Foundation for Basic Research for extending cooperation between research foundations of APEC economies.

The first step could be for the leaders of APEC economies to determine priorities for innovational growth. Based on these priorities, orders for particular research and development will be formed through the domestic research foundations. And the orders will be given to international research groups through a competitive procedure. Such international team work will promote increase of the research efficiency and, correspondently, enable economic growth of each of the APEC economies.

Practical issues of international cooperation between domestic research foundations can be discussed at the meeting of leaders of domestic research foundations of APEC economies.

The second step could be to utilize experience of other international organizations concerning multilateral financing of research. Forexample, suchexperienceexistsinEuropeanUnion. I mean the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for Research.

As a part of similar procedure for multilateral financing of research in APEC, we could also invite researchers from third economies, if necessary, to further enhance the performance.