Dear European Research Council Executive Agency,

Under the right of access to documents in the EU treaties, as developed in Regulation 1049/2001, I am requesting documents which contain the following information:

All information submitted by applicants since 2014 for ERC grants (starting, consolidator, advanced, proof of concept, synergy), in particular the descriptions of the proposals themselves as intended for the peer reviewer panel, independently of whether the application was successful or not, with any information that cannot be given due to legal requirements overriding the freedom of information request (e.g. privacy laws) blanked out.

Yours faithfully,

Konrad

Dear European Research Council Executive Agency,

I had previously requested ERC grant application documents since 2014, please don't forget about it. I understand that these are potentially a lot of documents, but assuming they are stored centrally, retrieving them should not be too difficult. I'm only really interested in the descriptions of the research projects themselves, so where information that cannot be given due to privacy laws etc. is concerned, please just omit the pages in question.

Yours faithfully,

Konrad Rolle

Dear European Research Council Executive Agency,

Thank you very much for your reply. You can use the following correspondence address: Unit 13926, PO Box 15113, Birmingham, B2 2NJ, United Kingdom

Yours faithfully,

Konrad Rolle

Dear European Research Council Executive Agency,

About this FOI request concerning ERC grant applications, I wanted to ask whether you have a timeline so that I know by when I can expect the request to be treated? Also, since this information is most likely held in electronic form, would it maybe be possible that you could make a Dropbox-link available (i.e. post it on this website) for me and any other interested parties to download the relevant files? This would be easiest for me.

Yours faithfully,

Konrad

Dear European Research Council Executive Agency,

I'm somewhat disappointed since you seem to imply that processing of my request has not even started yet even though I already provided you with an address 3 weeks ago (and you didn't find issue back then). As I had written in previously, physical correspondence can be sent to: Unit 13926, PO Box 15113, Birmingham, B2 2NJ, United Kingdom

Anyhow, since you don't seem to be too far with processing yet, I would like to state my preference for information provided in electronic form here. I have tried to scour a bit the asktheeu.org website and here is what they say about this situation: "If a public authority asks you for your full, physical address (postal address), reply to them saying that you would prefer to receive information in electronic form. This is your right under Regulation 1049/2001 if the information exists in that format."

If there is any problem with providing information in electronic form, e.g. via a Dropbox link, or anything else that stands in the way of your processing my request, if you stated your reasons it would obviously help.

Yours faithfully,

Konrad

Dear EC ARES NOREPLY,

I have received your reply dated 23/11 and signed by Mr Te Kolsté. First thank you for writing a reasonably detailed response, which refuses my request with the 2 arguments that the documents in question contain "personal data" and because "disclosure would undermine the protection of commercial interests".

With respect to these 2 objects, I feel that my request has been misconstrued, because in my original email (dated 27/08) I added the proviso "with any information that cannot be given due to legal requirements overriding the freedom of information request (e.g. privacy laws) blanked out." Indeed, while you quote my request in almost its entirety at the beginning of your letter, you inexplicably omit this section. So again, I would like to clarify that my original request was only one for (parts of) documents that can be made legally accessible, not for e.g. telephone numbers or email addresses of applicants.

Hence, a natural follow-up question is whether your response is meant to imply that indeed all parts of ERC grant applications that can be made legally public have been made public? In particular, you say that you recognize the "need for transparency" by publishing "an abstract of each ERC funded project" on your website. Since my request also included data about failed applications, how is it that the ERC does not publish abstracts about failed applications (since this data would presumably of interest to the public when e.g. 2 similar applications were submitted, but one was chosen by the ERC over the other)? I would hence feel that a response to my FOI request would include at least the abstracts of failed applications, since by analogy it should be possible to make these legally available.

Hence, could you please review your response to my request, whether it was not misconstrued? If helpful and necessary, I would of course be willing to restrict the scope of my request more explicitly by creating a follow-up request.

Yours sincerely,

Konrad

Dear European Research Council Executive Agency,

I have received your reply dated 23/11 and signed by Mr Te Kolsté. First thank you for writing a reasonably detailed response, which refuses my request with the 2 arguments that the documents in question contain "personal data" and because "disclosure would undermine the protection of commercial interests".

With respect to these 2 objects, I feel that my request has been misconstrued, because in my original email (dated 27/08) I added the proviso "with any information that cannot be given due to legal requirements overriding the freedom of information request (e.g. privacy laws) blanked out." Indeed, while you quote my request in almost its entirety at the beginning of your letter, you inexplicably omit this section. So again, I would like to clarify that my original request was only one for (parts of) documents that can be made legally accessible, not for e.g. telephone numbers or email addresses of applicants.

Hence, a natural follow-up question is whether your response is meant to imply that indeed all parts of ERC grant applications that can be made legally public have been made public? In particular, you say that you recognize the "need for transparency" by publishing "an abstract of each ERC funded project" on your website. Since my request also included data about failed applications, how is it that the ERC does not publish abstracts about failed applications (since this data would presumably of interest to the public when e.g. 2 similar applications were submitted, but one was chosen by the ERC over the other)? I would hence feel that a response to my FOI request would include at least the abstracts of failed applications, since by analogy it should be possible to make these legally available.

Hence, could you please review your response to my request, whether it was not misconstrued? If helpful and necessary, I would of course be willing to restrict the scope of my request more explicitly by creating a follow-up request.

Yours sincerely,

Konrad