Is Research Funding Now a Lottery? A Top Science Program Gets Flooded With Applications

One of the world's top science funding programs has been flooded with a record number of applications. The European Research Council, or ERC, received 7,710 applications for its Starting Grant program this year. That is a huge jump from just 4,807 applications last year. The surge is raising fears that many good scientific ideas will not get funded simply because there are too many requests and not enough money to go around.

The ERC's Starting Grant gives scientists up to €1.5 million — about $1.7 million — over five years. It is designed to help early-career researchers get their work off the ground. But this year, only up to 373 grants will be awarded, which is actually fewer than the 421 given out last year due to budget limits. That means the success rate could fall below 5%, compared to 8.8% last year. In other words, fewer than 1 in 20 applicants will receive funding.

Maria Leptin, the president of the ERC, admits the situation is worrying. She says the huge number of applications is making it very hard for her staff and the expert reviewers to fairly judge them all. "The number is a bit scary," she said. Reviewers are the people who read and score each application to decide which ones deserve funding. When there are thousands more to read, mistakes and oversights become more likely.

Scientists around the world are watching this problem closely. Lynn Kamerlin is a molecular biologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. She has studied how grant programs work and says that a healthy success rate for any funding program should be around 20%. When the success rate drops far below that, she explains, it becomes very hard to tell the truly great ideas from the merely good ones. "People can't tell the difference between the top 6, 8, 12%," she said.

Kamerlin has an idea for how to fix the problem. She suggests that a panel of experts should first choose the top 20% of applications based on quality. Then, winners could be picked randomly from that group. Some funding organizations are already trying this approach. She argues that when success rates are extremely low, the process is essentially a lottery anyway, so it is better to at least guarantee that only strong proposals are in the running.

A big reason for the flood of applications is artificial intelligence, or AI. AI tools have made it much easier and faster to write grant proposals. "It's just so much easier to generate text," said Kamerlin. However, she warns that AI can also produce writing that sounds good but means very little — what she calls "absolute nonsense." That means reviewers now have to read applications much more carefully than before, adding even more pressure to an already strained system. The ERC is Europe's top funder of basic science research, with a yearly budget of nearly €3 billion, and it is now facing one of its biggest challenges yet.