On the 11th June 2008 The Commission published notices from European Union Institutions and Bodies. The Council released its conclusions on the Special Report No 9/2007 by the European Court of Auditors concerning ‘Evaluating the EU Research and Technological Development (RTD) framework programmes — Could the Commission's approach be improved?’

The Commission recalled that under the treaty the Community shall have the objective of strengthening the scientific and technological bases of Community industry and encouraging it to become more competitive at international level, while promoting all the research activities. UNder this banner are included:

• Increasing human resources in research and development.
• Giving high priority to public investments in science and research.
• Fostering private investments.
• Reforming public research infrastructures.
• Promoting internationalisation.

Thus the Commission welcomed the special report by the European Court of Auditors concerning ‘Evaluating the EU Research
and Technological Development (RTD) framework programmes — Could the Commission's approach be improved?’ and recognised the efforts and achievements of the European Court of Auditors in producing this comprehensive SR.

The Commission established an overall evaluation framework in 2000 which was revised in 2002 and 2007 and that relevant adjustments are being made continuously with particular reinforcement in the FP7 as set out in the FP7 ex ante Impact Assessment, in the Internal Control Standards and in the recently developed ‘Quality Assessment Framework’.

These improvements include a new impetus to the Commission's existing internal ‘RTD evaluation network’, a better routine collection of data from projects, a new IT system for FP7, a more coherent and systematic use of performance indicators and the encouragement of scientometric approaches; and is therefore looking forward to the forthcoming ex post evaluation of FP6 in later this year.

However, the Commission stressed that, despite these adjustments, further efforts need to be undertaken to improve the research monitoring and evaluation systems on evidence based approach; therefore:

• Ensure greater clarity in the intervention logic in the conception and implementation of FPs.
• Establish a unified and coherent evaluation strategy across the relevant Commission services.
• Consider options for a more centralised evaluation and reinforced coordination between the relevant Commission services.
• Optimise the collection, analysis and use of evaluation data in such a way to better measure the achievement of programme objectives in terms of outputs.
• Establish the type and scope of evaluation in particular to give greater attention to assessing long-term impact of past and present FPs.