Zaharieva's research policy advisor sets out goals of ERA Act

A member of Commissioner Zaharieva’s cabinet has set out the aims and challenges for the forthcoming proposal on a European Research Area (ERA European Research Area ) Act.

Speaking at an event in Brussels on 30/06/2026, Manuel Aleixo, research policy advisor to Ekaterina Zaharieva, the European Commissioner for startups, research and innovation, said that protecting scientific freedom would be a major part of the ERA Act.

Aleixo said that the Commission was working on the proposal and looking very carefully at what sort of rights researchers should have as part of the ACT. This was because the Commission expected that any rights under the Act would be “extremely actionable”, i.e. that researchers would go to court to take advantage of their rights. For that reason, it was important to have the “correct definition” of rights, he said.

The official said that the main aim of the Act was to remove obstacles to researchers from pursuing scientific inquiry across the whole of the EU European Union and to building their careers in research.

Aleixo said that the Act aimed to make real a “fifth freedom”, the freedom to research across the EU, that had been highlighted in reports such as the one by Enrico Letta, the former prime minister of Italy. Letta called, in his report from April 2024, for the completion of the EU’s single market and the creation of an additional freedom to complement the EU’s four existing freedoms of goods, people, capital and services.

The advisor said that the ERA Act also aimed to address problems in the EU’s R&I Research & Innovation performance highlighted by Mario Draghi, former president of the European Central Bank, in his report of September 2024. Draghi had said that funding for R&I was too low and was fragmented among the 27 EU member states, Aleixo said.