Reduction of Red Tape in the Offing for European Researchers. (July 27, 2012)

A letter to this week's Science from the European Parliament's Rapporteur for the Specific Programme of Horizon 2020 and the European Commissioner responsible for Research, Innovation, and Science, Maria da Graça Carvalho and Máire Geoghegan-Quinn respectively, promises a significant streamlining of the financial rules under which the new European research and innovation program for the 2013 to 2020 period, HORIZON 2020, will operate.

They write that "Horizon 2020 will bring together all previous EU research and innovation funding instruments under a single program, providing funding for everything from basic research to demonstration and market uptake".

[T]he current complex matrix of reimbursement categories will be replaced by a single reimbursement rate per project and a single flat rate for overheads. There will be fewer requirements for timesheets to justify personnel costs. Horizon 2020 will also allow scope for experimenting with alternatives to cost reimbursement. A results-based approach with lump sums for whole projects or the use of inducement prizes would remove the administrative effort for reporting costs incurred... Project audits in Horizon 2020 will focus on fraud detection and prevention, rather than detecting and correcting errors as in the past... We aim to cut the time from submission of proposals to signature of the grant agreement by about one-third.

The letter concludes: "European taxpayers will be getting more output from their investments as scientists' time is freed up for the real work."