By Grace Gay for Research Professional News
The biggest European research policy and HE news you may have missed over the summer
Advanced Grants
The success rate for the European Research Council’s prestigious Advanced Grants for established researchers is set to almost double in the 2021 funding round, after an abnormally high volume of applications in the 2020 round. The ERC said it had received 1,735 applications for the 2021 round and earmarked €626 million to fund about 250 grants. That projected success rate of 14.4 per cent would be 80 per cent higher than the 2020 round success rate of 8 per cent, which was the lowest in the grant scheme’s 13-year history.
Full story: ERC Advanced Grant success rate set to almost double
Family allowance
Researcher groups have hailed changes to the family allowance of the EU’s funding programme for doctoral education and postdoctoral training. The allowance from the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions scheme has been increased to €660 per month from €500 and will be made available to researchers whose parental status changes during their project, while a more inclusive definition of family is being adopted to ensure that researchers in LGBT+ couples can access EU financial support.
Full story: Changes to Marie Skłodowska-Curie family allowance welcomed
Plan S
The open-access initiative Plan S has given its member funders leeway over how the researchers they support will have to publish any books about their work. “Rather than to decree a uniform policy” on books, it has instead provided recommendations because “book publishing is very different from journal publishing”, and “standards and funding models [for books] may need more time to develop”. It suggested that books based on original research directly supported by its members should be made openly available immediately, but that embargo periods of up to 12 months could work for other books.
Full story: Plan S lets members make call on open access to books
Picture of the week
The EU must support R&D if it is to achieve its central political goals of acting independently, hastening digitisation and mitigating climate change, according to a high-level European Commission report presented by its vice-president in charge of foresight, Maroš Šefčovič.
Cancer research
The three countries responsible for chairing the EU-related activities of the bloc’s member state governments from July 2020 to the end of 2021 have joined forces to try to increase the involvement of cancer patients in research into the disease. The research ministers of Germany, Portugal and Slovenia adopted joint principles of patient involvement in the spectrum of cancer research. They are intended to “align national and European research efforts” to link researchers with people who have cancer and other diseases, as well as their families. Other countries are being encouraged to sign up.
Full story: EU seeking to boost role of patients in cancer research
Gender equality
Women tend to feel they get too little credit for their contributions to research papers, whereas men feel like they get too much, according to a global study of the experiences of authorship. Chaoqun Ni of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her colleagues gathered experiences and perceptions of authorship from over 5,500 researchers worldwide, including how they talk or argue about it with co-authors. As well as feeling undervalued, women were more likely than men to experience authorship arguments.
Full story: Women ‘more likely to feel short-changed on authorship’
Horizon Europe
Kosovo has become the first country to successfully close dedicated talks with the European Commission on associating to the 2021-27 EU R&D programme, Horizon Europe. A spokeswoman for Kosovo’s science ministry confirmed that both sides are preparing to sign the agreement. She said the ministry expects the signing to happen in October, although Research Professional News understands the Commission is looking at November. The UK previously finalised the terms of its association to Horizon Europe but this was under broader negotiations on its relationship with the EU.
Full story: Kosovo ‘first’ to finish talks on Horizon Europe association
Open access
Researchers say data from the EU’s Horizon 2020 R&D programme suggest the European Commission made the right move when it decided the replacement programme, Horizon Europe, should stop funding open-access publication of research papers in ‘hybrid journals’ that mix open and paywalled content. Work by the Athena Research and Innovation Center, the research and policy analysis centre PPMI and Maastricht University estimated that the average cost of a researcher publishing a paper with publisher-facilitated ‘gold’ open access was €2,200. But the cost of such publication in a hybrid journal was €2,600.
Full story: EU data support not paying hybrid journal fees, study suggests
Quote of the week
“Vaccine scepticism…is holding us back from stabilising this crisis.”
World Health Organization regional director for Europe Hans Kluge
Horizon 2020
Applicants for funding from the EU’s 2014-20 R&D programme, Horizon 2020, had a success rate of just under 12 per cent over the first six years of the programme, according to the latest data. This compares with a success rate of 20 per cent for the previous EU R&D programme, Framework 7. It comes despite Horizon 2020 having a budget of about €77 billion, up from roughly €50bn for Framework 7. Higher education organisations formed the largest group of recipients, winning more than 39 per cent of awards.
Full story: Horizon 2020 success rate coming out at less than 12 per cent
Animal research
More than 70 researchers have called on policymakers to “listen more carefully” to the community when establishing rules around the use of animals in research, warning that “a new trend towards further regulation” could harm research and animals. Delays in permissions to follow up on unexpected observations mean the animals used grow too old to be used again, and new animals must be used to replicate the entire experiment, the group of mainly neuroscience researchers, led by Judith Homberg of the Netherlands-based Radboud University Medical Center, said in an article in the journal Neuron.
Full story: Researchers warn politicians not to clamp down on use of animals
Economics
A wholesale reboot of the world’s economic system is needed to tackle the climate change and biodiversity crises, according to the head of environmental issues for the European Academies’ Science Advisory Council. “The GDP-based economic system in which fossil fuel, food and agricultural interests are driving up carbon dioxide levels, deforestation, land clearing and overfishing is no longer fit for purpose,” Michael Norton said after the publication of the latest report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Full story: Climate and biodiversity crises ‘demand economic reboot’
Health innovation
An independent expert group tasked by the World Health Organization with rethinking European policy priorities in light of the pandemic has concluded that health innovation is “widely flawed” and must be changed to better address future health threats. “Enormous investments in biomedical innovation do not always flow to where they are needed most,” the report said. The experts said that public-private innovation partnerships, “unlike some in the past…must be based on transparency, with sharing of the risks and benefits of innovation”.
Full story: European panel says ‘flawed’ health innovation must change
Swiss substitutes
The Swiss government is tasking the Swiss National Science Foundation to create domestic substitutes for 2021 EU calls from the European Research Council Advanced Grants and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowships. Switzerland is ineligible to host grants from the schemes after its government walked away from relationship talks with the EU. The substitutes will be “aligned as closely as possible” with the EU calls but will have “independent submission deadlines”, the SNSF said.
Full story: Switzerland working on alternative to ERC and MSCA grants
Publishing platform
The platform set up by the European Commission to provide an alternative publishing venue for recipients of EU R&D funding has hit a milestone with the publication of its 100th article. Open Research Europe launched on 24 March, with the Commission saying it would address “major difficulties often associated with publishing scientific results, including delays and barriers to the reuse of results and high costs”. Papers are published on the platform at no cost to authors and with open access, meaning they are free for everyone to read.
Full story: Commission’s open-access platform hits milestone
Cohesion funds
Bureaucratic bottlenecks are blocking Slovakia’s attempts to use its €15 billion slice of EU development money for 2014-20 to fund economy-boosting R&D, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The ministries and agencies have struggled to recruit suitable grant evaluators, in part due to a “bad reputation” for what the work entails, poor pay and increased qualification requirements. Slovakia’s research ministry said many of the shortcomings in the report “were caused by inappropriate managerial decisions made in the past”.
Full story: Slovakia advised to tackle issues with using EU funds for R&D