The ERC started its preparation for Horizon Europe and announced interviews for Advanced Grants, an adapted call schedule and changes in its panel structure.
The European Research Council (ERC) started its preparations for a seamless transition to the next EU research and innovation framework programme, Horizon Europe. The ERC scientific council appreciates the fact that the Council of the European Union and the European Parliament have maintained the ERC’s mission and funding principle in their negotiations for Horizon Europe and are in line with the ERC’s position paper on that matter. Nevertheless, the ERC wants to make sure that the transition from Horizon 2020 to Horizon Europe is as smooth as possible.
The changes the ERC is already introducing now cover three different levels. On a first level, the ERC will introduce face-to-face interviews for Advanced Grants. These interviews already exist for the two other monobeneficiary instruments of the ERC, the Starting Grants and Consolidator Grants. They shall give the applicants the opportunity to defend their proposals in front of the panel and the panel a chance to investigate deeper.
The second level concerns the call schedule for the first two years of Horizon Europe. The ERC is planning to launch all their monobeneficiary grants in 2021 and 2022, but with shifted opening and closing dates. Like this, no call will be launched earlier than January 2021. The call schedule will then gradually move back to its original timing by mid-2022. Most likely, the adapted schedule will not include a call for Synergy Grants in the 2021 work programme, which will follow a year later. The changes in the call planning shall not affect the eligibility periods for applicants, e.g. with respect to years elapsed since their PhD. Extensions of the eligibility period may even be possible for individual cases. For the detailed call schedule, future applicants will have to check the ERC web page.
The last level concerns the addition of new peer review panels to the ERC’s evaluation structure. Currently, nine panels in the area of life sciences (LS), six panels in the area of social sciences and humanities (SSH) and ten panels in physical sciences and engineering (PE) are responsible for the evaluation process. The changes will now see an addition to the field of SSH with a new panel covering human mobility, environment and space, which will cover research on demography, population health, sustainability science, territorial planning and spatial analysis. A second new panel will cover material sciences in the field of PE. For LS, the ERC is not introducing any new panels, but redefining the contours and enriching the descriptors of the existing one. The new panel structure shall fit the numbers of proposals and the application patterns as well as generate disciplinary coherence between the panels and ensure interdisciplinarity in the panel structure. The adjustments are part of a larger reflection process on the evaluation structure, taking place at the ERC scientific council and at its executive agency ERCEA. The ERC has already published the panel structure it plans to have in place for calls from 2021 onwards.