Plans to speed up the payment of grants in Horizon 2020 could leave applicants lacking both time and guidance to finalise their projects, research groups have said.
Kurt Deketelaere, secretary-general of the League of European Research Universities, says participants will now have six months less to complete their grant agreements in Horizon 2020 than in Framework 7. “Leaving only three months for the administrative management of proposals will probably not be enough,” he says.
The European Commission wants to speed up the time it takes for grants to be agreed, to aid simplification and improve access to funding for small businesses. “We have an eight-month limit on time to grant, as set by member states and the European Parliament,” says a Commission spokesman. “The approach to evaluation and grant preparation therefore had to be fundamentally reviewed.”
The Commission will no longer give participants advice on how to improve their proposals, which was commonplace in Framework 7. “The Commission will be closed for negotiations and executive agencies are also difficult to get in contact with,” says one Brussels-based lobbyist. “Organisations are lost, not knowing where to get the information they would usually receive.”
The Commission will have five months to complete the scientific evaluation of proposals, leaving three months for participants to finalise preparations. Unlike in Framework 7, evaluators will no longer be able to recommend improvements for proposals that show potential, meaning each proposal will be judged solely as submitted. “This means we drastically shorten the time to grant for researchers, and we think it makes researchers get their projects ready to go first time,” says the spokesman.
Deketelaere says the reduction in overall time to grant from 12 to 8 months is welcome, but that the distribution of time between the Commission and participants needs to be reassessed. During Framework 7, the Commission completed both the evaluation and subsequent follow-up in three months, he says. “We haven’t received an explanation of why it needs five months now that it’s not giving feedback on proposals,” he says.
Michael Browne, head of European research and innovation at University College London, says some participants may welcome the removal of the negotiation process because their proposal already contains their best bid. “Some people find it challenging when the Commission refocuses the project,” he says.
But he is concerned that the Commission will be faced with an incoherent set of applications, especially in areas such as the societal challenges. “We’ve been so used to a tightly prescribed environment that moving to an environment that is not prescribed is a challenge,” says Browne. “It is unclear how this will work in practice.”