Commission adopts Parliament amendments on proposal for science statistics
The Commission adopted all but one of the European Parliament's amendments to its proposal for Community statistics on science and technology (S&T) on 7 October. The proposal aims to enhance the production of S&T statistics within the EU by improving data quality standards, and by introducing new fields in areas such as innovation, human resources devoted to S&T, patents, and gender statistics. The Commission accepted the Parliament's changes, which focussed on the need to take regional dimensions into account when producing statistics, underlining the importance of cooperation with the OECD (organisation for economic cooperation and development), and more frequent reporting by the Commission on the statistics. For legal reasons, the Commission was not able to accept an amendment that called for increased consultation with the Helsinki group on gender-related statistics. They did, however, stress the importance of the group's work, and pledged to continue their cooperative efforts with it. The adoption of the proposal by the Council of Ministers is now expected.