At ACA’s last General Assembly in late November, we had the pleasure to admit the Slovenian organisation CMEPIUS as a new member. Only a day after the General Assembly, we again had reason to be happy. RANNIS, the Icelandic Centre for Research, applied for membership. We organised a ‘written procedure’, which, unsurprisingly, produced a 100% majority in favour of the admission of RANNIS, a repeat of the result for CMEPIUS a month earlier.
RANNIS supports research, innovation, education and culture in Iceland. It cooperates closely with the Icelandic Science and Technology Policy Council and provides professional assistance in the preparation and implementation of the national science and technology policy. It also provides a secretariat for the Quality Framework for Higher Education in Iceland and for the International Arctic Science Committee. RANNIS administers competitive funds in the fields of research, innovation, education and culture, as well as strategic research programmes.
RANNIS coordinates and promotes Icelandic participation in the main European cooperation programmes: Horizon 2020, Erasmus+ and Creative Europe, as well as Nordic cooperation schemes including the Nordplus programmes. RANNIS supports directly academic cooperation with other countries mainly through the Erasmus+ and Nordplus mobility programmes - with funding of just under 3 M€ in 2017. It further provides indirect support through the Research Fund where cooperation is a criterion for selection and thus encouraged, but not specifically funded.
RANNIS reports to the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture and operates according to the Act on Public Support for Scientific Research (No. 3/2003). At the end of 2017, RANNIS had a permanent staff of 46 of which 2 are dedicated to the internationalisation of universities.
