European leaders and the European Commission have backed proposals to step up higher education mobility and exchanges and create a network of European universities with integrated study programmes and curricula that enable students to study abroad.

Britain’s relationship with the European Union has been a fruitful one when it comes to higher education. By operating within a larger European network, UK universities have become increasingly competitive in world terms.

If Asian universities are going to break into the world’s top 10, at least according to the new QS World University Rankings 2018, the most likely candidate is Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Technology, innovation and digitalisation must be seen as sources of income and not as costs to a business.

The Swedish government has changed the university law to ensure all doctoral candidates are made an employee of the university with a salary.

An expert group appointed by the government has proposed to change the procedures on how research funding from the Research Council of Norway is distributed and to cut the administrative budget of the research council by NOK80 million (US$9.6 million).

As United States and British legislators tighten the screws on travel and visa rules, they might be squeezing out international researchers and students. Canadian universities, meanwhile, are seeing surging interest from both groups.

Academics in Japan are bitterly divided over defence ministry grants to universities for defence-related research.

Mobile researchers get higher citation rates and are also more productive than the average.

Erdogan, has taken direct control of the appointment of university rectors and a further 1,267 academics have been dismissed.

The Lars Løkke Rasmussen government is moving to cut funding for universities and the student financing system and increase political control over higher education institutions.

A proposal for a more peer review based funding of Swedish research prepared by the Swedish Research Council has been rejected by a majority of Swedish universities.

Russian government failed to pay for the subscription for 2014 to the amount of €890,000 (US$1 million).

In northern countries the most important incentives for individual researcher mobility and ERC success is early independence.

The World Library of Science will give students and teachers around the world access to the latest science.

A number of Nobel prize holders have failed to win a ERC grant because their project proposals were not good enough.