ERC 2025 work programme published

This week the European Research Council (ERC) 2025 work programme has been published, including the provisional call calendar, after it was adopted by the European Commission. The work programme includes a call for each main frontier research grant, i.e. Starting, Consolidator, Advanced and Synergy Grant, plus a call for complementary funding for ERC Principal Investigators, i.e. the Proof of Concept Grant with two submission deadlines. The work programme contains also several other actions including public procurement, e.g. support to programme monitoring and evaluation, support to the Europe PMC initiative and assessment of the scientific impact of ERC-funded research. The main novelties compared to the previous (2024) work programme are:

• Total provisional budget of 2.7 billion euro includes already the approx. 400 million euro funding from Associated Countries (AC).
• Reference to the use of European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) for ERC (footnote on p. 14). The right to exercise portability will be limited to legal entities established within the territory of the concerned Member State which has requested the transfer of such funds.
• Eligibility extensions (p.24-25): Disability added as separate category. Major disasters includes disasters caused by humans (e.g. armed conflicts).
• Evaluation procedure general (p.34): ERC evaluation panels are instructed to approve or reject proposals as a whole, and they may not select parts of a proposal for funding e.g. panels cannot cut the budget in all proposals for a certain percentage.
• Evaluation panel Physical Sciences and Engineering 6 (PE6) change in panel descriptors (annex 1).
• Evaluation of Synergy grants (p. 36): in step 2 flexibility in the number of panels, between 5 and 7 panels (previously it was 5) and proposals will be retained for step 3 based on the outcome of the evaluation at step 2 and a budgetary cutoff level of up to three times the panel's indicative budget (previously it was four times).