“We wish to appeal to the Prime Minister to stop the plans that would strip the NCN of independence and lead to public grant resources being awarded based on criteria other than scientific excellence”, writes a group of FNP Award winners in an open letter to Mateusz Morawiecki. The open letter comes in response to the announcement of a grant system reform, which has raised red flags in the research community.
In the last few days, another open letter to President Andrzej Duda and Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki was written in defence of the NCN and its independence by ERC grant winners. Today, 49 winners of the FNP Award, one of the most prestigious distinctions in Poland, raised a new voice of concern at the changes that would affect the NCN.
In their open letter to the Prime Minister, they emphasise that “The statutory foundation of the NCN is political independence and its mission is to fund only the best research projects based on external (mainly international) decisions of experts (a peer review system)”. “These decisions are based exclusively on criteria such as the innovative nature of the project and the applicant’s research record. An alternative to the current model would be to award grants based on political, ideological, regional or personal preferences. As history (including our own history of communism) has taught us, a funding model of this kind spells nothing but disaster for science and is bound to lead to a huge waste of public resources”, they add.
The National Science Centre is modelled on the European Research Council (ERC) and operates in a way similar to that adopted in research-funding agencies in countries that hold up the highest standards as concerns public spending on research.
“We believe that the repeated announcements of unwarranted changes in the NCN model which, to boot, have never been discussed with the Polish research community, will do immense harm to science in Poland but also to the image of Poland as a modern country that respects international research-funding standards”, the letter argues.