Guest Blogger: Dr. Peter Maassen
Dr. Maassen is Professor of Higher Education and Head of Research at the University of Oslo and a Senior Research Fellow at NIFU STEP. He is also Director of Hedda, a consortium of European centers for research in Higher Education.
The establishment of the European Research Council (ERC) 27/28 February 2007 is an important milestone for European research policy. For the first time in its history Europe has a continental research council comparable to the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the USA in the sense that it supports top basic research, or in the words used by the ERC: "investigator-driven fundamental research of the highest quality". To put it in soccer-terms: the ERC aims at creating a European 'Champions League' of top researchers. The total budget to achieve this mission is for this period (2007-2013) around € 7.5 billion. Every researcher from anywhere in the world fulfilling the eligibility criteria can apply for an ERC grant under the condition that the applicant will do his/her research in Europe.
Even though the ERC's programme is part of the seventh Framework Programme (FP7) it has an organisational structure of its own that is independent of FP7. This structure consists of a Scientific Council and an Executive Agency. The former is responsible for all scientific ERC matters, including the funding strategy, the annual work programmes and call for proposals, the evaluation (through peer review) of the proposals received, and the selection of the proposals to be funded. The ERC Executive Agency (ERCEA) is a management
structure responsible for the implementation of the decisions of the Scientific Council, which includes the contract negotiations with the researchers whose proposals have been selected for funding. The ERC is an important innovation in the EU's research policy: it supports individual researchers and their teams instead of projects; it uses scientific quality as the only criterion for selecting proposals instead of a set of political, academic and social criteria as the other programmes in FP7; it does not take geography into account in allocating funds implying that it does not aim at spreading the funds more or less evenly over Europe; all fields of research are eligible instead of a limited number of targeted research areas; and it provides the selected researchers with rather substantial grants of up to € 2 million (starting researchers) and € 3.5 million (advanced researchers). The competition for these grants is organised in two separate biennial rounds, i.e. in year 1 only young researchers, i.e. researchers who have obtained a PhD more than two years but less than ten years ago, can apply for a grant, in year two only senior researchers, in year three only young researchers, and so on.
After around 2,5 years of operating this is an appropriate moment to reflect upon the results of the ERC up till now. The reasons are first, the signing of contracts with all grantees for the first round of grants competition for young as well as advanced researchers. Second, the publication on 8 September of the results of the evaluations of the second round of competition for young researcher grants, and third the publication of a report by an independent expert panel on the structure and mechanisms of the ERC. In this blog I will present the first results of the ERC. In a next blog I will discuss the main conclusions of the review report.
Concerning the ERC funding results so far it is of importance to take the ERC's organisation structure into mind. The Scientific Council selects the proposals to be funded, as well as possible candidates for a reserve list. Using the list of selected proposals set up by the Scientific Council the ERCEA negotiates the grant contract details with each selected candidate. In this the ERCEA cannot add non-selected candidates to the list, nor can it change the order or take any decision or initiative that is not in line with the decisions and intentions of the Scientific Council.
However, the outcomes of the negotiations are dependent on a number of factors that might lead to differences in the list of grant holders signing a contract compared to the original list of candidates selected by the Scientific Council. For example, certain selected candidates might no longer be in a position to accept the grant, implying that one or more candidates from the reserve list will receive a grant. Second, candidates might in the meantime have moved to another European institution, implying that the institution, and in some cases the country, where the research work to be funded by the ERC grant will be done is different from the one where the candidate applied for a grant. The consequence of this is that nor the list of proposals selected by the Scientific Council nor the statistics published by the ERC on the selected proposals per country is the same as the list of final grant holders. Also the final list of grants per country after all contracts per round are signed differs from the original ERC statistics. The data presented in this blog are based on the actual contracts signed by the grantees. Therefore they differ from the statistics presented by the ERC on its website. Given that they are based on the contracts signed, they are more reliable than the data presented by the ERC itself.
The first round of competition for starting researcher grants (in 2007) resulted in a very large number of proposals, i.e. 9147. This is regarded as an indicator of the success the ERC. The large number of proposals took longer to review than was foreseen, and the final first round contracts (in total 300) have only been signed earlier this year. The first round of competition for advanced researchers was launched in 2008 and resulted in 2167 proposals. Also here the final contracts have been signed, resulting in 273 senior researchers receiving an ERC grant. Obviously there are winners and losers in these first rounds. From a country perspective the overall winner is the UK where a total of 114 (57 starting and 57 advanced researchers) will do their ERC funded research work. This implies that 20% of all ERC grants executed until now are awarded to researchers employed by a UK institution. Other countries that have come out of the ERC competition with a relatively high number of grant holders are: the Netherlands (46 grant holders), Switzerland (43 grants), Israel (39 grants), Sweden (27 grants), and Finland (16 grants). Also France has done relatively well with 72 grant holders.
The relative 'losers' are in the first place the central and eastern European EU members states where no or only one to three grant holders are employed. The exception is Hungary with 10 grant holders, which is more than all other central and eastern European countries together. Other countries that are underperforming from the perspective of their population, R&D investments, research productivity and researchers per 1000 inhabitants are: Norway (3 grants); Ireland (3 grants) and Portugal (3 grants). Also Germany has not come out of the competition as well as could be expected (especially compared with the UK and France) with 58 grant holders, and neither have Italy (44 grant holders) and Spain (38 grant holders).
This picture is continued in the second round for young researchers (2009): most grants awarded to researchers working in the UK; German institutions hosting a relatively low number of grant holders, as are Spain and Italy; central and eastern European countries are underrepresented; and no researcher hosted by a Norwegian institution selected for a grant.
Various statistics on the ERC results will be published on the Hedda website in the coming weeks.
