More than 1,000 researchers have signed an open letter urging the European Research Council (ERC) to reconsider its plans to restrict unsuccessful applicants from resubmitting for up to three years, claiming longer waiting periods will “discourage bold ideas in favour of ‘safe’ proposals”.

Criticising plans to extend the time that researchers must wait until reapplying to the European Union’s flagship research funding programme, the letter the ERC’s plan to hold down application numbers “penalises high-quality proposals, discourages early-career researchers and disproportionately affects researchers from less well-resourced institutions and countries, thereby widening structural inequalities”.

“Many ERC funded breakthroughs emerged only after earlier rejections and iterative refinement,” it continues, arguing “science – especially ambitious and ground-breaking frontier research – does not progress linearly”.

“At a time when Europe is explicitly aiming to strengthen its innovation capacity, strategic autonomy, and technological leadership, limiting access to its most successful research instrument sends the wrong signal,” it says.

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The open letter has been signed by just over 1,000 researchers, mostly senior professors or ERC grantees, from more than 200 institutions in 36 countries just three days after it was published on 25 April.

It follows the announcement by ERC president Maria Leptin on 16 April that “painful measures” were needed to reduce “growing pressure” on grant reviewers who had seen applicant numbers soar in recent years. Many believe the boom in applications is linked to the growing use of generative artificial intelligence (AI), which has led to greater numbers of high-quality applications reaching panel consideration.

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“I don’t have data about AI proposals flooding the system, but I think it’s a reasonable assumption that this factor contributes to the problem,” Oded Rechavi, professor of life sciences at Tel Aviv University, who was one of the initial signatories to the open letter, told Times Higher Education.

“I hope and believe that most scientists don’t use AI to write for them, and that most scientists don’t want AI to replace them completely, and scientists want to study their own ideas, not ideas that AI generates for them,” he continued.

“But there’s a very good chance many scientists use AI to speed the writing process and make it easier, and that this leads to more proposals being submitted,” concluded Rechavi.

Instead of limiting resubmissions, the letter calls for the ERC to consider “effective, less damaging alternatives” including “stronger pre-proposal filtering” in which principal investigators would be asked to submit a two-page outline of their proposed study, with panels inviting “only a subset of researchers to submit a full proposal”.

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The ERC should consider increasing the number of panels and subpanels in oversubscribed domains, increase its use of remote evaluation instead of the current in-person model, and encourage national funding agencies to “automatically fund ERC-grade proposals just below the cut-off, reducing repeated resubmissions to ERC calls”, the letter also suggests.

It also urges the ERC to target an annual budget increase of €500 million a year, noting its annual budget of between €2.3 billion and €2.7 billion represents a “fraction of the resources available to US agencies” whose National Institutes of Health has a $50 billion budget while the National Science Federation has a budget of between $8 billion and $10 billion.

“Europe expects its single flagship excellence scheme to absorb massive demand with a fraction of the resources available to US agencies, while maintaining ultra-low administrative resources and exceptionally deep peer review,” it states, adding “this mismatch is not sustainable”.

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com