Federal Act
on the Promotion of Research and Innovation
(RIPA)

¹ The as­so­ci­ation of Swiss academies is the Con­fed­er­a­tion’s fund­ing body for strength­en­ing co­oper­a­tion in and between all aca­dem­ic dis­cip­lines and for root­ing sci­ence in so­ci­ety.

² It uses the con­tri­bu­tions gran­ted by the Con­fed­er­a­tion for the fol­low­ing pur­poses in par­tic­u­lar:

a.

con­duct­ing and pro­mot­ing the early re­cog­ni­tion of themes rel­ev­ant to so­ci­ety in edu­ca­tion, re­search and in­nov­a­tion;

b.

striv­ing to en­sure that who­ever makes or ap­plies sci­entif­ic dis­cov­er­ies as­sumes their eth­ic­al re­spons­ib­il­it­ies;

c.

en­cour­aging dia­logue between the world of sci­ence and so­ci­ety; it pro­motes stud­ies on the op­por­tun­it­ies and risks of in­nov­a­tions and tech­no­lo­gies.

³ The academies co­ordin­ate their re­search fund­ing activ­it­ies in the con­text of the as­so­ci­ation and in par­tic­u­lar en­sure col­lab­or­a­tion with high­er edu­ca­tion re­search centres.

⁴ They pro­mote col­lab­or­a­tion among sci­ent­ists and ex­perts in spe­cial­ist bod­ies, com­mis­sions and oth­er suit­able or­gan­isa­tion­al forms and use these to per­form their tasks.

⁵ They sup­port in­ter­na­tion­al sci­entif­ic col­lab­or­a­tion by fund­ing or run­ning suit­able in­sti­tu­tions, in par­tic­u­lar na­tion­al co­ordin­a­tion plat­forms and sci­entif­ic ad­min­is­trat­ive of­fices for in­ter­na­tion­ally co­ordin­ated pro­grammes in which Switzer­land par­ti­cip­ates.

⁶ They may sup­port data col­lec­tions, doc­u­ment­a­tion sys­tems, sci­entif­ic journ­als, pub­lic­a­tions, or sim­il­ar in­sti­tu­tions, which serve as use­ful in­fra­struc­tures for the de­vel­op­ment of fields of ex­pert­ise in Switzer­land and which do not come un­der the re­mit of the SNSF or the high­er edu­ca­tion re­search centres or do not re­ceive dir­ect sup­port from the Con­fed­er­a­tion.

⁷ Based on the fin­an­cing de­cisions of the Fed­er­al As­sembly, SERI peri­od­ic­ally enters in­to a ser­vice level agree­ment with the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sci­ences. In this doc­u­ment, the as­so­ci­ation and the in­di­vidu­al academies may be as­signed with eval­u­ations un­der para­graphs 1–4, with the im­ple­ment­a­tion of sci­entif­ic pro­jects, the op­er­a­tion of in­sti­tu­tions un­der para­graph 6 and oth­er spe­cial tasks.