ERC aims for inflation increase to grants and considers new scheme

President reveals budget-dependent plans, including “exploratory” project funding, as agency launches inaugural Plus Grants call The European Research Council’s governing Scientific Council wants to increase the size of its grants to account for inflation for the first time in 2028-34. It is also considering launching a new scheme for “smaller, exploratory” projects, if it gets sufficient budget. ERC president Maria Leptin revealed the plans yesterday in a webinar to accompany the launch of the funder’s new Plus Grants scheme offering larger and longer grants. New thinking, number crunching Last month, the Scientific Council created a taskforce of members to think about the ERC’s grant portfolio for the 2028-34 version of the EU research and innovation programme the funder is part of, Leptin said. She added it has a “number of plans” if the budget for the funder is doubled, as has been proposed by the European Commission. But the budget is still being debated by the other EU political bodies. These plans “include an inflation adjustment of the grants”, Leptin revealed. They also include accounting for the funder receiving more excellent proposals than it can support, she added, implying an increase to the budget allocation for existing schemes. “But of course, the Scientific Council also has all sorts of ideas of what other programmes one might have, and smaller exploratory grants are one example,” Leptin added, having been asked by a webinar participant whether this option is being explored. “We haven’t been able to diversify and to follow all the excellent ideas that come up in the Scientific Council simply because of loss of money—we’d have to take it from elsewhere,” she explained. “We will be thinking, we’re crunching the numbers for what we might do in the next framework programme, and [smaller grants are] one example.” But the Scientific Council will also have to consider what to do if the ERC’s budget is not doubled, Leptin said, adding that this would “tie our hands massively”. ‘Wow us, but convincingly’ Leptin told listeners that researchers are expected to “wow” its evaluators with their applications for its new Plus Grants scheme—or else save themselves the effort and not apply to it at all. The scheme offers individual researchers up to €7 million over a period of up to seven years and so is intended to support work that standard ERC grants cannot due to their budget or length restrictions. “Sometimes there are ideas or experimental plans that are really very big,” Leptin said, adding that the funder was therefore “hoping to see projects that really go beyond what a regular grant can achieve, either in time or in finances”, although applicants need not request the maximum in both respects. But she advised applicants not to make “false promises”, as these would be “immediately seen by the [evaluation] panels”. In fact, the ERC intends to issue this advice to applicants for all of its schemes, Leptin revealed. “It will be the content that has to convince,” she said. ‘A lot of pushback’ Leptin said there had been “a lot of pushback” from researchers on the creation of the larger Plus Grants given that, due to budget shortages, the ERC cannot support many of the excellent proposals it receives to its existing schemes. She explained it had been given extra funding for that specific use by the European Commission, and that another aim of the scheme is to provide a “clear signal that Europe has the means for supporting the boldest, most courageous ideas”. The extra amount would have made little difference to the roughly 1,000 other grants the funder already awards each year, she added, because only 30 Plus Grants are expected to be awarded each year. This small number means it would be “mad” for “everybody who applies for a regular grant” to apply for a Plus Grant, according to Leptin. Anyone who wants a “reasonable chance” of winning ERC funding should apply to its regular schemes, she said.