Iberia thirty years after Saramago's Stone Raft: Opportunities for technical change and challenges for science and technology policy under increasing uncertainty

This article looks critically at strengths, limitations and underlying assumptions of the evolution of science, technology and higher education policies over the last decades in Spain and Portugal. It introduces a Special Issue with a collection of research articles aiming to launch a discussion about new potential future horizons for the Iberian countries. The ultimate goal is to identify opportunities for technical change and to help promoting science and technology policy in times of increasing uncertainty by framing critical issues of scientific employment and responsibility, together with ethics and values of scientific and academic culture that are associated with policy analysis and research.