Horizon 2020 mainly concerns collaborative research projects: groups of researchers who come from different organizations, from at least three countries, to carry out EU-funded research and development activities. But clearly, some countries are more important than others in creating these consortia.
This diagram, produced by the European Commission, shows the network of collaborations on Horizon 2020 projects. The oldest, the so-called EU-15 countries are represented in blue; the new EU-13 members are represented in orange; and the associated countries – non-EU countries that have agreements to participate regularly in Horizon projects – are represented in green. The size of the nodes expresses the importance of a country in the network, while the width of the links expresses the number of collaborations between countries.
The graph shows the most common collaborations: Germany, France, United Kingdom, Italy and Spain.
But there are some interesting models of those who work regularly with whom. For example: German participants are frequent partners of researchers from the new EU member states, such as the Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania and Slovakia. At the same time, Croatia, Malta and Romania have strong ties with Italy, while Bulgaria, Cyprus, Estonia and Slovenia tend to connect with Spanish participants.