Fall in demand for European Research Council grants in first Horizon 2020 call

A total of 3,272 proposals were submitted in the 2014 European Research Council (ERC) starting grant competition, the first such call under the new EU research programme Horizon 2020, which closed on 27 March.

In figures released last week, the ERC said, “Compared to the 2013 call for Starting Grants that attracted 3,329 applications, the demand this year decreased by around 1.7%.”

The ERC remarked that this is a “stabilis[ing] of demand” following successive yearly increases. 

Explaining the slight drop, the ERC pointed to the ineligibility of Switzerland – which on 26 February was barred from participation in ERC proposals – as something that “may have played a role.”

Switzerland is broadly recognised as a stalwart for winning and hosting ERC grants. The success rates of researchers applying with Swiss host institutions have been roughly twice as high as the European average. As of December 2013, 318 ERC grant holders are based in Switzerland, of which 75 per cent are non-Swiss nationals.

Restrictions on who exactly is entitled to submit a proposal may be another contributing factor, the ERC says. A researcher who submitted for a call under ERC’s 2013 and whose proposal was “not of sufficient quality to pass to step two of the evaluation” was not entitled to apply to this year’s competition.

In this call, the distribution of applications across the three disciplines was as follows: 1,494 proposals were submitted in 'Physical Sciences and Engineering', 1,030 in 'Life Sciences' and 748 in 'Social Sciences and Humanities'.

There were no aggregate country figures on where the proposals came from.

In the 2013 Starting Grant call, 300 top researchers were awarded grants of nearly €400 million in total, with a success rate of around 9 per cent. In this year's call, the overall call budget is €485 million.

ERC starting grants target researchers who are starting out on their independent research paths.

A specific criterion for earning a starting grants include holding a PhD between at least two and seven years prior to the publication of a call. It is also expected applicants will have produced at least one “important publication” without the participation of their PhD supervisor.

Starting Grants may be awarded up to a maximum of €1.5 million for a period of five years.