Senior CNRS staff lament organisation’s ‘slow decline’

The CNRS, France’s largest public research organisation, has been suffering a long-term lack of investment, according to members of one of its important committees.

Senior members of the National Committee for Scientific Research said in an article published in the newspaper Le Monde on 1 December that the French government had done nothing to halt a steady fall in CNRS staff numbers.

The members of the committee, which oversees recruitment and evaluation of CNRS researchers, said that the number of CNRS staff had fallen by 1,200 over the past 10 years. Applications for working at the CNRS are open once a year; this year there will be 250 positions open, down from 300 over the past few years, the article said.