Does the European Union Waste Money on Academic Grants for Former Eastern European Communist Countries?

AbstractAfter the admission into the European Union in 2007 Romania started to benefit from transnational academic programs financed by the European Union. These programs are designed to develop the human resources from Eastern European academic communities and to avoid the brain draining phenomena. But the question is: can these EU funded grants improve the scientific level of the researchers from former Eastern European communist countries? Our survey tried to reveal how effective one of these EU transnational grants in Romania was and to develop a conceptual frame for this new educational environment in Romania and in Eastern Europe in general. The methods used are specific to the concept of focus group. The target group elected, in which I was a member for 12 months, with 6 months extension, was a group of postdoctoral researchers from a transnational EU funded grant destined to communicate science to the general public. By its status, this grant involved transnational academic exchanges and, among other parameters, we considered the number of ISI articles published by the researchers and the admission to ISI rated international conferences. Regarding the quality of the research, among others, we tried to reveal the rate of rejection for the ISI articles meant for publication. The results indicate a significant gap, in terms of a various parameters, regarding the quality of scientific research, between the Western academic community and one of the Eastern European similar communities