A few European countries are setting aside money to fund top-notch European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant proposals that didn't quite make the cut for the ERC's competition. You can read about it in this week's Science (subscription required). Briefly, 430 proposals of the more than 9,000 submitted were deemed worthy of funding, but the ERC estimates that the €290 million budget will only fund about 300 of those. France, Italy, Switzerland, and Spain all have announced that they will step up and provide some form of funding for those top-tier proposals that don't get funded.
France's Agence Nationale de la Recherche has announced it will put up €10 million to fund the unfunded ERC proposals submitted by scientists at French host institutions. Italy has set aside €30 million for any unfunded Starting Grant finalist, on the condition that they perform their research in Italy. Switzerland's National Science Foundation has announced that it will review the ERC finalist proposals from Swiss host institutions and provide some sort of funding for those that meet certain additional criteria. And Spain will provide €100,000 to the Starting Grant finalists at Spanish host institutions to help them set up labs or get their projects started while they apply for funding elsewhere.
We here at Careers are pretty impressed with this idea: The European Commission already put in the time end effort to peer review the grants, so the national governments can't really go wrong funding proposals already deemed excellent. In this era of tight federal budgets, could this model work for, say, top-notch-but-turned-down NIH proposals? Could a state government or private foundation pick up NSF proposals that would have been funded if the payline had been more favorable? It's an interesting way to get additional mileage out of the grant/peer review system.
A press release about the alternate funding can be found here. Feel free to read our previous blog posts on the nationalities of the finalists and the selection of the finalists; also check out Elisabeth Pain's article last July, "Getting to the Top of a Big Pile," in which she talked to ERC proposal reviewers about what makes a proposal stand out in a pool of 9,167 applications.
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