The budget of the NCN has been practically frozen for the past few years and inflation has reduced the real value of NCN grants. If our budget is not increased next year, success rates, which are already rather low enough, will be pushed down even further.
“It would be a good idea to try and persuade decision-makers to grant the NCN an extra 150-200 million PLN in additional funding to buttress its budget for next year. This would increase the success rate for our calls to around 25%”, writes the President of the NCN Council in the latest issue of “Forum Akademickie”.
The President of the NCN Council also presented several possible scenarios that could be adopted by the NCN to stop the success rate from falling even in the absence of extra funding. The Council may, for instance, reduce the number of projects that can be conducted in a parallel fashion, introduce funding limits or cancel one of the calls.
At the same time, Professor Kuźnicki emphasised that research funding is the best form of investment; any changes of the kind described above would have an adverse impact on the conditions for research in Poland. “Supporting the rise of a young generation of researchers and creating the conditions for them to work in Poland will reduce the current brain drain and, in the long run, may even reverse it”, he writes.
Professor Kuźnicki points out that it would also be possible to boost NCN funding without further increasing the burden on the state budget; this could be achieved by transferring 10% of the NCBR budget to the NCN.
The full article by the President of the NCN Council can be found on the website of “Forum Akademickie”.