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field in its very essence. Promoting interdisciplinarity is thus an important requirement for leadership in nanoscience research. Some actions that would help promoting interdisciplinarity are the following: positive evaluation of interdisciplinary curricula in calls for public funding; promotion of interdisciplinary research centers, such as the new nanoscience centers; promotion of postgraduate master courses, perhaps by merging some of the very specific courses nowadays available in Spanish universities into larger ones with broader scopes.
4. Actions to develop in Spain 2010–2013 It was mentioned above that the state of scientific research in some areas of nanomaterials science is quite competitive worldwide. However, if we expand our publication research (based on Web of Science data) to the larger field of nanomaterials in general, we find the Spain is only the 14th in rank of publishing countries. This fact shows that Spain has nowadays the manpower required to take the lead in the pursuit of some of the hottest topics in nanomaterials science research, but it nonetheless lacks enough scientific infrastructures, evaluation mechanisms and educational opportunities to exploit at full its human potential.
• Strategic research objectives should be clearly defined, and sufficient funding should be delivered as Strategic Actions into particular fields both to keep the leadership in successful areas and promote new topics in the Spanish scientific landscape.
The actions to be undertaken in the near future must aim at the double objective of keeping and reinforcing our leadership in those successful areas, such as graphene research, Scanning Probe Microcopies of Nanobiotechnology, while promoting high-quality scientific research in those areas in which it is missing and yet they are recognized as strategically relevant for our country. In the following we enumerate a number of suggested actions that could help us getting closer to our objectives:
• In general a closer contact between scientific research and industry must be pursued. 5. Required infrastructure The founding over the last few years of a number of research centers with a focus on nanoscience research can in principle provide the Spanish scientific community with a strong structural basis to pursue scientific excellence and leadership worldwide.
• In the last few years, a number of research centers with specific focus on nanoscience and nanotechnology have appeared in different regions of Spain. These centers should keep a sufficient funding to become attractive to foreign researchers or Spanish researchers working abroad.
In the next few years they should be equipped with the scientific infrastructure and technology that will enable them to develop high-quality scientific research. The required investment must be evaluated by external scientific committees to ensure that the funds are really helping capable researchers to carry out relevant investigations.
• In order to keep the level of scientific funding high in the midst of an economic crisis, it is important that serious evaluations of research outcomes are routinely done, and that the results of such evaluations is taken into account to obtain further funding.
Constant and fluid communication channels must be open among research groups and among nanoscience centers. Thus, the creation of new scientific and technological networks and the promotion of the already existing ones, such as the successful NanoSpain network must be one of the axes of scientific policy.
• Nanoscience is an interdisciplinary research
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