ERC schemes: a webinar summarising changes for 2024 (Becky’s notes)

For further information on our courses or 1:1 support for ERC, UKRI, Wellcome and other research and fellowship grant applicants please see: https://research-in-focus.mykajabi.com/researchgrants

Wednesday 20th September 2023: Today the European Research Council (ERC) held a webinar to present an overview of the changes to the 2024 programme and answer questions.  A recording of the whole webinar may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/live/WkrbOdZfhvM?si=tj2mKXmSKJIFY2mD and further details can be found on the ERC’s webpage here: https://erc.europa.eu/news-events/news/ercs-plan-2024-adopted 

The following are my notes (taken live and posted here asap!), and therefore may include omissions or misinterpretations of what was said as well as typos and suboptimal grammar! Proceed with caution:

• All the usual Grant types will be available: Starting, Consolidator & Advanced single PI awards, Synergy grants for 2-4 Pls and Proof of Concept awards for work following on from previous ERC grants.
• Starting, Consolidator and Synergy are now open. Advanced will open in May '24.

Changes to the '24 programme:

• What has not changed is that scientific excellence remains the only factor for consideration (I’d argue the definition operationalised via the assessment criteria is pretty broad…).
• What has changed is the way some parts of the forms are structured and the guidance to reviewers. There is a drive to simplify, but not too much… E.g. B1 and B2 are still requested from the outset, even though B2 won’t be examined unless your application progresses to Stage 2. The justification given was that many PIs said they write B2 first and then summarise to produce B1 and to issue grants in a timely manner there could only be a couple of months between B1 being successful and B2 having to be submitted, which wasn’t deemed viable.
• The main change to the application forms is that the track record and CV are now linked and composed of a 4 page template, consisting of 4 parts, this is simplified compared to previous requirements. The new form includes sections for personal education/experience and on research achievements, where up to 10 achievements should be listed. Each achievement/contribution listed (E.g. paper, monograph, etc) should demonstrate how you have advanced the field and there is a short narrative section for each of the 10 achievements, to describe the role the PI played and how important that contribution was to the field. The narrative should be used to demonstrate evidence that the PI has the capacity to deliver what is proposed in the application.
• The track record template also includes a context section for describing things like career breaks and community building commitments/contributions. The usual rules apply to elements such as extending eligibility periods due to documented career breaks (maternity/parenting/parental leave/etc)
• The scientific proposal is as before:
  • B1 the 5 page descriptive overview
  • B2 the 18 page full scientific proposal
• In assessment, panels are guided to focus primarily on the project proposed not the PI
  • the groundbreaking nature
  • the potential impact (in the normal usage of the word ie change created)
  • whether the proposed project is feasible
• PI assessment: intellectual capacity, creativity & commitment, are all to be reviewed in the context of the project rather than as absolute measures.
• The questions given to reviewers have been streamlined and made consistent with the revised expectations.
• Although RiF concentrates on supporting applicants in making the scientific case, and leaves costing, etc. guidance to the experts within your Research Office I’ll mention the changes to Advanced Grant payments as there were many questions in the live chat about it; the ERC’s presenters suggested that they’d run a separate webinar closer to the Advanced Grant launch date in May 2024. A lump sum (rather than claiming actual costs) approach will now apply to advanced grants (ie very much like UKRI’s approach) as a pilot. Apparently, synergy grants have been paid like this for a while. It's mainly just an admin thing and is irrelevant for the scientific assessment. But it does mean no time sheets or audits for PIs!  Applicants will need to pay attention to how many person months are required by all individuals on the grant, equipment costs, etc. and make sure they are reasonable and necessary as this will be assessed to ensure the budget is commensurate with the work proposed.
• Investigators may spend a minimum of 30% of their time on the grant, and up to 100%. Time (and the costs of time) will need to be commensurate with the work proposed and in line with national salary norms I.E. someone cannot claim 200% salary because that’s what they would be paid if they were working in a country with higher average salaries!

Panels have been restructured:

• SH5 (and 3) were felt to be too large so SH8 has been created and covers studies of cultures and arts. This means there are now 4 social science and 4 humanities panels.
• LS3 has changed title to clarify that regenerative biology and STEM cells are included.
• LS5 has new subtitles.

Organisation of the evaluation process:

• has been tweaked to add an A (still excellent) classification, in addition to the usual A (meets all criteria, should be funded if there are sufficient funds), invite to interview, and B (doesn’t meet all criteria), but this additional category is “A - not invited to stage 2”. Previously not being invited to interview meant that applicants had to wait at least 12 months before reapplying. This meant that panels would sometimes call people to interview even though they didn't think the project would be competitive (because being rated A but placed on the reserve list meant no resubmission restriction) at interview but was still very good and they wanted to see it again soon! In other words it was a bit of a waste of time for everyone, but prevented the PI from having to delay their resubmission.
• Panels will have a cap of 44 interviews in each round. Naturally panels can interview fewer applicants if they feel quality is lower than expected.
• The cap of 44 interviews is because all interviews and panel business must be concluded within 5 days in person, in Brussels, including some allowance made for travel.
• A cap of 44 means panels will be interviewing ~11-12 applicants per average full day!
• [caution some of this is me reading between the lines and joining sentences uttered in different parts of the webinar!] For large panels (some of whom receive 150-180 applications) this means that the interview selection rate will be very tough. BUT because success rates are set overall and budgets agreed over the whole portfolio as not to disadvantage popular or costly disciplines, I.E. more of the 44 will be funded in panels which receive many applications I.E. for more over subscribed panels stage 1 will be tougher, but stage 2 will be easier, relatively!  The likelihood of being funded from the outset should be the same regardless of panel.
• From a comment about wanting to ensure everyone was fresh and could give their best whether it was the panel in the Brussels time zone or the applicant in their time zone I assume that the process will still be interview via video conference (WebEx was used for all 2023 rounds).
• The timing within the calendar of deadlines is now back to the usual periodicity. It was atypical for Horizon 2020 as that was ratified late.
• The budget has been set at €2.2bn+ contributions from associated countries expected at €120m + the UK contribution of £3-400m resulting in a ≈ £2.5bn programme overall.
• The synergy grant budget will be approximately £400m, up from €300m because they are so popular the success rate has historically been ~9%
• I didn’t catch how much has been allocated to proof of concept, the bulk & remainder after Synergy & Proof of Concept budgets are deducted will be split approx equally between Starting, Consolidator, and Advanced grants.

Success rates:

• There was discussion of aiming for a success rate of approximately 15% because below 10% was felt to result in the loss of too many excellent proposals, and make the process a bit of a lottery at the top.
• In terms of success rate vs the experience of the applicant. The ERC's data shows that very new researchers i.e. immediately after their PhD, have a slightly lower success rate than those in the mid to end of the eligibility window for starting grant, but that otherwise the success rate is flat. The success rates for consolidator, advanced and the transition points between starting & consolidator and consolidator & advanced are fairly flat, suggesting no motivation to apply early or late, just when you are ready.

Multidisciplinarity and panel transfers:

• Proposals can be transferred between panels with the agreement of both chairs, but this is very rare and when it does happen the receiving panel chair usually asks for reviews from relevant original panel members.
• Cross panel applications are welcome, but relatively rare as the panels themselves are designed to be multidisciplinary. This type of application tends to be less successful than single panel applications in step 1, but more successful in step 2 (B1&B2 review & interview). The ERC officials presenting the webinar recommend that cross panel applicants work more on being persuasive, particularly in terms of communicating that what they propose is very innovative, that it matters, and-is feasible, in B1, because those making it to step 2 seem to find the case easier to make via B2 and live via interview, than their single panel competitors.

Assessment Criteria:

• In terms of assessment criteria, the high risk/high gain criterion has disappeared because it was felt impossible to assess fairly by many panels. Frontier research is by its nature high risk, and wouldn't be interesting if PIs weren’t asking the unknown, but panels have struggled to weigh the gain factor i.e. should they rank a high gain, low risk proposal more highly than a higher gain, higher risk one? In essence, what the ERC are looking for is projects that are well managed to minimise operational risk and have feasible backup plans for the intellectual risk that should be present in any worthwhile research endeavour. Ultimately what they want is projects which lead to breakthroughs!
• The novel methodologies review question has also been removed because it was felt that the outcome i. e. the break though was more important than how the proposer got there. Of course, for some profits the methodology is the breakthrough, or one of the contributions that the work will make, but for other projects the goal is the knowledge, which can be accessed using a conventional methodology.

Becky Steliaros PhD, MBA

Director, Research in Focus Ltd

20/9/23

For further information on our courses or 1:1 support for ERC, UKRI, Wellcome and other research and fellowship grant applicants please see: https://research-in-focus.mykajabi.com/researchgrants