During the past ten years there has been an increase in the collaboration effort between European academic institutions and industries, which participate in the Framework Programs of the European Research Area (ERA), and are administered by the European Commission. There has been a constant change and improvement in several factors such as the tools provided, the amount of funding, the flow of information, etc. which make project running to be more smooth  than in the past.
We have analyzed the actual data for the 5th FP and 6th FP for the partnerships that were established between the different partners. We do so in different scales for the location of the projects, from Country, to Region, to City, to the actual Partner.
The implications from the different tools employed in these projects (IP, STREP, CA, etc.) are also analyzed. From this quantitative analysis we arrive at the following interesting conclusions: We see that the way that the Partners are connected is not at all random, but forms a scale-free distribution.  Comparison of the distributions between the 5th FP(2001-2006) and the 6th FP(2007-2013) shows that scientific collaboration has indeed become more intense in these past ten years. We then form the weighted connection patterns between the partners by assigning a weight proportional to the number of projects that were carried out in this period. By use of the Minimum-spanning tree of this network we see the distinct role of Germany in the overall (total) number of the projects, but also we see the different role of other leading countries, such as the U.K, France, Italy in the different thematic areas, and according to the strengths and emphasis placed in these areas in each country.