Statistics on application and success rates per Career Stage in ERC
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:
Since the 2021 call, the online ERC application form has been asking to fill out the career stage of the applicant.
I would like to request data concerning the application and success rate in ERC according to the career stage, as entered by the applicant, If possible per call year and per gender (not for non-binary since the expected low number and the resulting possible identification).
Application rate: number of proposals received
Success rate: % of successful proposals (main list and picked-up from reserve list)
Years: 2021, 2022, 2023, (2024 application rate only)
Categories: StG CoG AdG SyG
Gender: M F
Career stages: Category A – Top grade researcher, Category B – Senior researcher, Category C – Recognised researcher , Category D – First stage researcher, Not filled out by applicant
Thank you in advance.
Yours faithfully,
Iesel Van der Plancken
Link: [1]File-List
Link: [2]Edit-Time-Data
Link: [3]themeData
Link: [4]colorSchemeMapping
[5]RE: access to documents request - Statistics on application and success
rates per Career Stage in ERC - Ares(2024)2226875 (Please use this link
only if you are an Ares user – Svp, utilisez ce lien exclusivement si vous
êtes un(e) utilisateur d’Ares)
Dear Ms Van der Plancken,
We refer to your request submitted under Regulation (EC) No 1049/2001 via
the website “asktheeu.org”.
At the outset, please note that “asktheeu.org” is a private third-party
website and has no link with any institution of the European Union.
Therefore, the European Commission and the ERCEA cannot be held
accountable for any technical issues or problems linked to the use of this
system. The private third party running the specific website is
responsible and accountable for the processing of your personal data via
that website, and not the ERCEA. For further information on your rights,
please refer to the third party’s privacy policy.
Your request has been handled by the ERCEA as a request for access to
information under the Code of Good Administrative Behaviour.
Through your request you are asking for “data concerning the application
and success rate in ERC according to the career stage, as entered by the
applicant, If possible per call year and per gender” for years 2021, 2022
2023, (2024 application rate only), for the calls StG, CoG, AdG, SyG, for
genders male or female and for the following career stages: “Category A –
Top grade researcher, Category B – Senior researcher, Category C –
Recognised researcher, Category D – First stage researcher, Not filled out
by applicant”.
Having verified the type of information which has been collected and
processed by ERCEA and which correspond to your request, please find
attached a pdf document concerning the calls for Starting Grant and
Consolidator Grant for years 2020-2023 showing the success rate per
gender. As you can see ERCEA uses as proxy for the researchers’ career
stage the “years since PhD”. Since researchers are not further categorised
depending on their career stage, so we cannot provide information
categorised as requested. For year 2024 there is no data available at the
moment.
For the calls for Advanced Grant and Synergy Grant this data is not
processed in the same manner, as the career stage is not a parameter.
Certain data is collected for monitoring purposes also for these two
calls, but it is not of the same quality as for the calls where the career
stage is carefully monitored for eligibility purposes. Please see below
two tables showing the success rate in relation to the years since the PhD
for all 2021 and 2022 calls, where, however, the gender of the researchers
is not indicated. Please note that the call Synergy Grant was not launched
in 2021. For years 2023 and 2024 this data is not yet available.
We hope the information provided is of help to you.
We would like to ask you to confirm receipt of the present e-mail by
replying to [6][email address] .
Kind regards,
ERCEA Access to documents team
Dear ERCEA ACCESS TO DOCUMENTS,
Thank you for the statistics on gender and years after PhD. These data have been presented by ERCEA on several occasions already and are very interesting.
However, my question concerned the data that are collected in the online forms since the 2021 call regarding the career stage of the applicant. As ERCEA is collecting these data, I would assume they are used for statistics. Years after PhD do not reflect the stage a researcher is in at the time of the application, especially for women with children.
The help option in the template mentions: "This information will not be provided to the evaluators and it will not be evaluated. " If these is not used for statistical purposes either, why is this question then part of the template?
Yours sincerely,
Iesel Van der Plancken
[1]RE: access to documents request - Statistics on application and success
rates per Career Stage in ERC - Ares(2024)2226875 - Ares(2024)2598256
(Please use this link only if you are an Ares user – Svp, utilisez ce lien
exclusivement si vous êtes un(e) utilisateur d’Ares)
Dear Ms Van der Plancken,
Thank you for your question.
After checking internally with different ERCEA's departments, we have
confirmed again that ERCEA does not hold any statistics in the requested
form, i.e. depending on the career stage, but only in the form already
provided to you through our previous reply.
As to why this field exists and what ERCEA does with this information,
please note that ERCEA must use similar templates to those applied by the
other EU services. The objective behind this approach is to harmonise as
much as possible the data structure of the application forms used in
different parts of the research programme. However, ERCEA does not take
this information into account, as it is not needed for the evaluation of
the proposals, and it does not process it further for any purposes. For
this reason ERCEA unfortunately does not hold any statistics reflecting
the content of this field.
Kind regards,
ERCEA Access to documents team
Dear ERCEA ACCESS TO DOCUMENTS,
Thank you very much for your efforts.
Yours sincerely,
Iesel Van der Plancken