The European Research Council (ERC) has reversed its decision to tack on an additional year to resubmission wait periods for researchers whose grant applications have been previously denied. The about-face comes a week after scientists began signing an open letter in protest.
The council’s jettisoned new rules, introduced on 16 April, were meant to reduce the number of applications the ERC receives and ease pressure on reviewers, according to the announcement.
“The ERC Scientific Council has listened to the concerns from members of the research community about the recent announcement on changes to the re-submission rules,” Maria Leptin, professor at the University of Cologne and president of the ERC, wrote in a response published April 29.
The ERC will retain the current resubmission wait times for 2027 instead of adding a year to its lockout period—the strongest point of contention in the open letter from researchers.
“We all were extremely happy [that] we got a hearing, that it was discussed, and that we could change something,” says Sarah-Maria Fendt, professor of oncology at Katholieke Universiteit (KU) Leuven, who spearheaded the open letter with colleagues at the university, but “we are kind of back to the status quo.” The council still needs to address the root problem of too many applications for not enough money, she says, especially because there’s no guarantee that the changes won’t come back in 2028.
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he open letter, posted on 21 April and eventually signed by more than 1,000 scientists, argued that the measures would “penalize high-quality proposals” and “discourage bold ideas in favor of ‘safe’ proposals,” and would disproportionately affect young researchers and those from countries with weaker funding infrastructure. The letter suggested alternatives to ease the administrative burden and also asked for an additional 500 million euros to be added to the ERC’s 2.3- to 2.7-billion-euro annual budget.Researchers who signed the letter say they are mostly pleased with the response. “It’s nice to see that [that the ERC is] kind of flexible and responsive to what people are saying,” says signatory Dominic Burrows, a postdoctoral researcher in basic and clinical neuroscience at Kings College London, who works at the intersection of computational neuroscience and gene therapy. He adds that the success of the letter makes him feel that he has “a voice, and that there are some things that you can do kind of collectively.”
“We’re very hopeful that this will be a way to open the dialogue with the ERC,” says Johanna Joyce, professor of oncology at the University of Lausanne, who also helped spearhead the open letter. “We’re just very pleased that they listened, and that they were OK to reverse that decision.”
The ERC did not respond to The Transmitter’s requests for comment. Its written response to the open letter says that Leptin and the ERC “look forward to working with the community to ensure that the ERC continues to deliver the best support for research in Europe” but does not suggest other approaches it might take to ease the administrative burden on the council, or reveal how resubmission rules might change in 2028.
The lack of information in those two areas is “disappointing in general,” says Bart De Strooper, UK Dementia Research Institute group leader at University College London and professor of molecular medicine at KU Leuven. “This is maybe a battle that we won, but it’s a big war which is going on about the ERC and what it should become.” The fact that reviewers can’t handle the volume of applications shows that “the fundamental problem is the ERC is underfunded,” he says.
“It’s like a plant which grows beautifully, but the pot is too small,” he says. “You don’t cut it from all sides, because that doesn’t work. You find the bigger pot.”
