This report, written by Japan's Council for Science and Technology Policy, provides recommendations to Japanese ministries for promoting science and technology diplomacy. Suggestions include pursuing research collaborations with developing countries and boosting capacity building efforts in these nations, fostering young researchers and engaging with global collaborative science projects.

This report summarises the evidence and main conclusions from a two-day meeting on science diplomacy, hosted by the Royal Society in partnership with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in June 2009.

The report explains the 'three dimensions of science diplomacy' and explores topics such as the soft power of science and practical barriers to scientific exchange. It also presents two case studies of science diplomacy, including how large science collaborations are being used to improve relations with the Islamic world.

This report, published by the Swiss Academy of Sciences (SCNAT), describes twelve projects to illustrate successful scientific partnerships between developed and developing countries.

The projects cover research into water-borne disease, natural disasters, brain drain and forest management, and include partnerships with researchers in Chad, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Thailand and Vietnam.

The report reveals how high-quality local and global scientific knowledge can lead to local development benefits. For example, collaboration between developed-country researchers and their counterparts in locations where infections are likely to arise can halt epidemics at the local level, benefiting the global sphere.

The authors suggest that future research budgets must take into account the global and cross-diciplinary nature of research and encourage scientific cooperation.

They say that approximately 85 per cent of global research and development resources are invested in countries within the Organisation for Co-operation Development (OECD), compared with just five per cent given to developing countries.

This paper presents a review of the challenges of international scholarly scientific collaboration. It looks at institutional constraints and points out that the challenges and problems multiply when collaborators come from different countries with differing conditions, resource endowments and institutional structures. It is easier to call for more and better forms of international collaboration than it is to design them. The report asserts that good design is helped by a better understanding of what collaboration is and how it has been carried out. It draws on social research insights to help reduce the transactional, financial, ethical and emotional costs of international linkages and exchange and provides a conceptual framework for thinking about international collaboration issues.

This report attempts to understand the growing trend of international scientific collaboration as a preferred method of building scientific capacity in developing countries. Before the effects of these trends can be documented, however, there is a need to better define scientific capacity itself. This is relevant not only as an end in itself but also as a means of identifying potential collaborators. The traditional dichotomy of developed and developing countries no longer seems to serve the purpose of increasing useful understanding of these trends. The report attempts to provide a new index of scientific capacity based on an aggregation of several national-level measures and creates a useful taxonomy of countries categorised by scientific capacity. The four classifications arising from this taxonomy are scientifically advanced, proficient, developing, and lagging countries. It examines the trends in output, productivity, collaboration and linkages between and among countries in each of these categories.

This study examines the role of science, technology and knowledge in development programmes.

Based on qualitative data collected from 14 donor agencies around the word, the author presents a summary of donors' science and technology activities and their supporting mechanisms associated with knowledge for development, including research support, capacity building and technology transfer.