Evaluating the first year of Horizon Europe, the research community provides recommendations to improve the next six years of the programme.
On 8-9 February 2022, Science Business organised a conference to assess the first year of Horizon Europe (HEU). During the conference, Science Business released its report on “how make the next six years of HE even better”. Overall, the report shows that most of the research community believes that the framework programme has an essential impact on the European R&D landscape and has improved compared to Horizon 2020.
The report indicates that there is a key concern that HEU is not as open to newcomers and third countries as expected. In 2021, in particular the uncertainty of the UK’s and Switzerland’s association to HEU caused problems. Researchers hope that the European Commission (EC) would provide better guidelines on third-country participation, as well as guarantee more stability when it comes to participation in the framework programme. Concerning access to the programme within Europe, especially newcomers and East Europeans faced specific barriers, among them transparency. The EC could improve the situation considerably if HEU work programmes and draft forms were circulated among the whole research community, not only among insiders. Additional training for East European participants would also support success rates for research proposals of the Widening Countries. On the administrative side, the negative points mentioned were paperwork, application forms, and the online portal. Further guidelines would be needed for the application process, especially for the Funding & Tenders Portal. A user-friendly interface should be provided too. Respondents also believe that there should be a better balance between the administrative content and the science content, namely horizontal aspects (e.g. open science, data management plans, data privacy, ethics, do no significant harm principle) should be less exhaustive. When it comes to the gender equity plans that are required from 2022 onwards (see SwissCore article), most surveyed organisations seem to be prepared and support the new requirement, hoping that it can address persisting inequalities in research organisations. However, some organisations in Central and Eastern Europe fear that the gender plan requirement could further deepen the East-West inequalities. Referring to the evaluation, experts should come from the same research field that they are evaluating and feedback should be more comprehensive, the right to react, as in the case of the EIC pathfinder call 2021, should be considered. Content-wise, calls, especially in pillar 2, were frequently too broad. Another main challenge was the delayed start of Horizon Europe and the related short time to prepare first applications, especially during summer when applicants were on holidays. Impact factors were often too ambitious and difficult to achieve. The EC should provide more details on the political context, so that applicants would better understand the impact that should be achieved through the project.
In January 2022, the Guild also published a survey to gather experiences of applying to the HEU programme. Overall, respondents were positive when it comes to the application process. Still, minor issues in the application form negatively affect applicants’ ability to fully express the relevance and novelty of their proposed research. For example, rigid application forms with a significant amount of repetition, including mandatory tables, reduced the space available to discuss the impact and the excellence of the proposal. The new feature Impact canvas, a requirement for applicants to project their projects’ long-term outcomes and impacts, was assessed as a challenging aspect of the applications. Its usefulness and legitimacy were questioned. For the Impact canvas, additional samples for social sciences and humanities should be included, as currently, there is only one example of engineering/technology available. Additional guidance on the administrative forms for non-research partners as well as for the ethics, security and previous publications/projects sections should be provided. The annex forms on clinical trials need to be clarified, and the stability of the online platform has to improved.
Answering to the findings and the recommendations of the assessment on HEU, Mariya Gabriel, Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth, promised during the Science Business conference that the EC would provide additional guidance on HEU, and improve the drafting of the programme and call texts. Jean-Eric Paquet, EC Director-General of Research and Innovation, also assured that improved guidelines will be provided, especially for the digital application process, without indicating a definite date. Additionally, he said that the EC is working on improving connections between different areas, programmes, and initiatives in HEU, especially for the joint undertakings, topics across the six clusters, the ERC and the EIC.
Paquet and Gabriel also explained that after assessing the Lump Sum Pilot in H2020, this funding mechanism would progressively be rolled out in 2022 and especially in 2023 to simplify HEU. Nonetheless, stakeholders are concerned about the precipitated expansion of lump sums in HEU, indicating that it has to be further analysed as it is not completely clear if it simplifies things or if it causes other possible negative implications (for example, major planning for work packages, reduced flexibility, and limited openness in team compositions).