More than 1,000 scientists from Europe and beyond signed an open letter, posted online 21 April, protesting changes to the European Research Council’s (ERC) grant competitions that would make unsuccessful applicants wait longer before reapplying.
The changes, announced 16 April, are meant to reduce the number of applications and ease the administrative burden on reviewers, the ERC says. But the researchers argue they further limit access to Europe’s best source of scientific funding and discourage the kind of ambitious, innovative projects that ERC grants were designed to foster.
The letter was composed by Sarah-Maria Fendt, professor of oncology, and others at Katholieke Universiteit (KU) Leuven. It is addressed to the ERC, the European Commission and members of the European Parliament, and it states that the researchers are “deeply concerned that the adopted measures risk undermining the ERC’s mission, excluding innovative scientists, and weakening Europe’s global competitiveness in basic research.”
The letter also suggests increasing ERC funding, noting that the annual budget is only about 2.3 to 2.7 billion euros per year. But the researchers say they are in full support of the ERC itself.
“ERC is fantastic. It’s one of the best things that has happened to European science funding in the last two decades,” says signatory Carlos Ribeiro, senior group leader of the Behavior and Metabolism Lab at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown, who is part of the FlyWire Consortium. “This is by no means a criticism to this bottom-up, PI-driven funding mechanism. If at all, it’s a plea to expand it and strengthen it and not cut off people from applying with their most original and also daring ideas.”
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he ERC was formed in 2007 and created a kind of “champion’s league” in European science, says signatory Bart De Strooper, UK Dementia Research Institute group leader at University College London and professor of molecular medicine at KU Leuven. “All of a sudden it was possible for a clever, good young person with some output to put some ideas there and then get the grant. No political hierarchy, no other bullshit, I would call it, from the universities,” he says.Since then, the ERC has funded more than 10,000 researchers—including 15 Nobel Prize winners—and has a 16-billion-euro budget for 2021 to 2027. Overall application success rates range from 11 to 15 percent, according to the ERC, and earning a grant is a two-step process. First, applications are given letter grades. Only A’s pass to the second step of grant consideration. Previously, applicants receiving a C were forbidden from reapplying for two years, B’s were locked out for one, and A’s that were rejected in the second round could apply the following year.
Under the new rule, applicants who received a C in 2024 can no longer reapply in 2027; neither can those who got a B or C in 2025. Applicants who get an A in 2026 and are rejected in the second round can reapply in 2027.
“And now they are saying, don’t bring a very exciting project in, because if you fail … you are not allowed to apply anymore,” De Strooper says. “It’s fundamentally against the spirit of the ERC.”
In a letter explaining the change, Maria Leptin, professor at the University of Cologne and president of the ERC, wrote that the ERC first tried to limit applications by “communicating the need for applicants to reflect carefully on the right timing of their application and the maturity of their scientific proposal,” but that had not been effective. “We must now turn to more direct measures to restrict the possibilities for unsuccessful applicants to resubmit their proposals.”
After the researchers’ letter was published, Fendt communicated with people close to the ERC, who say the council has discussed the points the scientists raised, she says. The ERC president’s office initially told The Transmitter it would provide comment, but it did not respond to subsequent requests.
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unding is already scarce in Europe, and researchers are “constantly applying for stuff in the hope that something will work out,” 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, and who says he plans to apply for a grant when he is a principal investigator.Adding another year between applications will reduce the overall funding opportunities, especially for younger researchers, Fendt says, and this can be disastrous for researchers hoping to start their own lab.
The restrictions could also disproportionately affect researchers from countries with less scientific funding, according to the researchers’ letter. “A lot of funding has disappeared, especially at the national level,” says Ribeiro, who applied for a grant in 2025, received a B and is now locked out until 2028. His current funding runs out after 2027. Portugal, he says, does not provide bridge funding, and many of his colleagues at Champalimaud share his tenuous position.
The idea of applicants seeking the “right timing” to apply—as Leptin wrote in her letter explaining the change—is “completely anachronistic,” Ribeiro says. In countries like his, having to wait another year for ERC funding will drive most labs out of existence. Besides, he says, science moves so fast that if researchers are required to wait an additional year before reapplying, the idea in your application “will likely just be completely outdated.”
