Task Force Recommends European Research Council to Remain Within European Commission with Greater Autonomy. (July 13, 2011)

The €7.5 billion European Research Council (ERC) was set up in 2007: to stimulate scientific excellence in Europe by encouraging competition for funding between the very best, creative researchers of any nationality and age. The ERC also strives to attract top researchers from anywhere in the world to come to Europe. The ERC, which is the newest, pioneering component of the EU's Seventh Research Framework Programme ('Ideas' Specific Programme), has a total budget of €7.5 billion from 2007 to 2013.

The ERC Scientific Council is currently chaired by Prof. Helga Nowotny and is composed of 22 eminent scientists and scholars, including a number of Nobel Prize winners. Based in Brussels the ERC's Executive Agency's staff of 330 implements the strategy.

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Yesterday a task force set up by the European Commission to recommend the future of the European Research Council proposed that from 2014 there be a quasi-full time role for the President of the ERC, who chairs its Scientific Council, which sets the organisation's scientific and research policy. The President should be based in Brussels. Furthermore, it recommended an enhanced role for the Director of the ERC's Executive Agency, which administers the ERC's funding for the leading researchers in Europe.

A number of other changes have been recommended designed to reinforce the ERC's flexibility, efficiency and autonomy and to make it easier for researchers to apply for and manage ERC grants.

The task force concludes that the ERC should remain an executive agency as the best way for it to deliver major contribution to the forthcoming Horizon 2020 programme.

In the view of the task force: "Simplification and savings would be achieved by abolishing, from 2014, the post of ERC Secretary General – whose current role as the Scientific Council's permanent presence in Brussels would in future largely be part of the role of the President - and by eliminating the extra costs of supporting a President outside Brussels.

Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, EC Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science said: "The task force's report shows consensus on the ERC's success so far, on its strengths and weaknesses and on the need for both broad continuity and for limited but important changes. I have said before that I am the ERC's greatest fan and the report confirms that judgement. I will consider it carefully and the Commission will come forward as soon as possible with measures taking account of the task force's work, so that we can get the ERC on the best possible footing for the future"

The president of the Scientific Council, Helga Nowotny, who sat on the task force that produced the report at several points almost quit the ERC, frustrated with the cumbersome bureaucracy. But now, she says, the ERC's Executive Agency has become more professional, procedures have been streamlined, and tensions with the Scientific Council have eased.

However, geologist and E.U. policy expert Geoffrey Boulton of the University of Edinburgh told ScienceInsider: "The scientific community has been very pleased by the ERC's performance, but it worries that it will be sucked into the European bureaucracy; now, it will require more vigilance."

Finally, the task force identified several ways to make life easier for ERC-funded scientists—for instance by abolishing timesheets for full-time grantees and reducing the number of audits. But Boulton says those reforms don't go far enough; in his view to determine whether or not its money is well spent, the ERC it needs only to check whether its grantees publish in scientific journals.