“Fewer grant awards and non-competitive salaries may cause the most talented researchers to move out of Poland or leave the research sector entirely. As a country, we must prevent such negative outcomes”. Professors Robert Hasterok and Zbigniew Błocki sounded the alarm in a letter to the Minister of Science and Higher Education.
Prof. Robert Hasterok, President of the NCN Council, and Prof. Zbigniew Błocki, NCN Director, appealed to Prof. Przemysław Czarnek, Minister of Science and Higher Education to increase the budget of the NCN. They are requesting a PLN 300 million increase in grants-in-aid and a 4.2 million increase in the subsidies for management and operations. The letter was sent to coincide with the period when the 2024 state budget is to be discussed.
The main objective of the National Science Centre is to support the best basic research in Poland by funding research projects, scholarships and postdoctoral fellowships, through a portfolio of more than ten different grant programmes. The NCN is also very actively involved in programmes organised within the European Research Area and collaborates closely with many leading research-funding organisations worldwide.
The NCN Director and the President of the NCN Council pointed out that, a few years ago, the success rate in NCN calls stood at approximately 25%. Today, the agency can only afford to fund 13% of submitted proposals, and if the budget is not increased soon, the situation is likely to get even worse, with the success rate potentially plummeting to under 10%.
“In the interest of Polish science and its long-term growth, we need to, at the very minimum, restore the previous level of funding, which stood at 25%. This would allow the NCN to support the best basic research projects, which are extremely important for our country’s growth”, they wrote.
The two leaders also observed that research projects are becoming more cost-intensive these days, as seen particularly in the last round of NCN calls, due to drastic increases in the cost of services and materials, including research equipment. “We have also been repeatedly alerted to the fact that salaries offered under NCN grants are too low and fail to match the current cost of living. Unfortunately, because of our limited budget, we find ourselves in a position where we cannot address the negative consequences that stem from the broader macroeconomic situation”, they add.
The grant-in-aid that the NCN receives increasingly fails to meet the demand of the research community in Poland. The annual NCN grant has gone up by just c. 13% in the past five years, from 2018 to 2023. Over the same period, the total sum requested annually by researchers in NCN calls has grown from c. 5.4 billion zlotys in 2018 to c. 8.6 billion zlotys in 2022, representing a c. 59% increase.
“We get a lot of proposals every year, which suggests there is a lot of interest in our portfolio, and Polish researchers want to conduct increasingly ambitious research. At the same time, fewer grant awards and non-competitive salaries may cause the most talented and highly specialised researchers to move out of Poland or leave the research sector entirely. As a country, we must prevent such negative outcomes”, the authors write in their letter to Prof. Przemysław Czarnek.
The letter to the Minister of Science and Higher Education was sent on 5 June. Increasing the grant-in-aid to cover the statutory tasks of the NCN in 2024 by 300 million would represent a 22% increase over the current funding level
The Main Council of Science and Higher Education also joined the call for the ministry to increase research funding, including the amount of the NCN budget, in its resolution no. 44/203, where it issued a positive opinion on the NCN’s 2023 action plan. The Council emphasises that “without a radical increase in research funding, including the NCN budget, research in Poland will be at risk of a general collapse, where the activities of the National Science Centre may be severely limited”.
This opinion is echoed by the President’s Council for Higher Education, Research and Innovation. In an interview published by “Forum Akademickie” on 24 May 2023, the President of the Council emphasises that the Council fully supports a grant increase for the NCN. The appeal has also been backed by the leaders of NCN Expert Teams in a letter to the Minister of Science and Higher Education, in which they argue that “it will be impossible to make up for the losses caused by the chronic underfunding of scientific research”