Council agrees remaining specific programmes of the Fourth Framework Programme
The Council reached agreement on the remaining ten specific programmes of the Fourth Framework Programme (1994-1998) on 1 December 1994. This means that the overall implementation structure of the Fourth Framework Programme is now in place. The ten programmes agreed by the Council were: - Transport; - Biotechnology; - Targeted socio-economic research; - Diffusion and exploitation of results; - Training and mobility of researchers; - Environment and climate; - Biomedicine and health; - Nuclear fission safety; - Joint Research Centre (EC); - Joint Research Centre (Euratom). The programmes will not be officially adopted until the preparation of the texts of the programmes in all the official Community languages is complete. The specific programme dealing with controlled thermonuclear fusion has yet to be adopted. The first opportunity for doing so will be at the next meeting of the Environment Council on 8 December 1994. Prof. Antonio Ruberti, Commissioner for science, research and development, expressed his satisfaction at the successful collaboration between the institutions which resulted in the agreement on the specific programmes in record time (under nine months). He recalled that the Commission had already taken all the necessary measures to proceed with the launch of calls for tender for the majority of the specific programmes on 15 December 1994. The programmes concerned with the Joint Research Centre and controlled thermonuclear fusion, however, will not launch calls for tender. On the initiative of Prof. Ruberti, the Commission has already defined the main areas of activity of the work programmes for the specific programmes. In the light of the decisions taken by the Council on 1 December 1994 and the opinions submitted by the relevant committees, the Commission will soon adopt them definitively. The launch on 15 December of the calls for tender for the different programmes will be the first time one of the measures taken to increase the transparency of the management of RTD programmes is implemented, namely the publication on fixed dates four times a year of the calls for tender (15 March, 15 June, 15 September, 15 December).