The numerical success rate for the NCN calls in which results are to be announced in early December will be a single digit. “This is a great blow to Polish research, but we need to be clear about why this is happening. The budget situation at the NCN right now is tragic”, says Prof. Zbigniew Błocki, the NCN Director.
OPUS is the NCN’s flagship call, open to researchers at all career levels. It gets more than half of the NCN’s budget resources. PRELUDIUM is targeted at the youngest researchers, who have yet to earn their PhD.
OPUS 25 and PRELUDIUM 22 were launched in March. The projects are currently under review, with results scheduled to be published in early December. Based on the proposals that were submitted, however, we can already estimate that the financial success rate will fall somewhere around 10%, and the numerical figure will be a single digit.
Grants will be awarded to just a few percent of researchers who applied for funding to pursue their research plans and ideas.
“This is a hard hit for researchers. We have always protested whenever the success rate dropped below 20% and it is now already below that of the ERC”, the NCN director says. “Nearly 2.2 thousand proposals with a total budget of almost 3 billion zlotys were submitted under OPUS 25. In PRELUDIUM 22, a similar number of proposals requested a total of more than 300 million zlotys. And our budget for the two calls is just 335 million.”
“I think we should consider adding a footnote to all negative funding decisions, like the one we get on our electricity bills, which tells us, e.g., to whom we owe this or that discount. It looks like the NCN will need to tell researchers who won’t get a grant why they didn’t get it despite submitting a very good proposal that absolutely deserved to be funded”, the director comments.
We have already raised the alarm that the NCN call budget has hardly increased over the past six years. In the same period, the sum requested by applicants grew by several dozen percent.
An appeal issued in June by the NCN Director and the President of the NCN Council, which asked the Minister of Education and Science to increase NCN’s funding by 300 million zlotys, has gone unheeded.
At the same time, the draft budget bill for 2024, submitted to the Sejm at the end of September, includes a 2.3 billion increase in spending on science and education. “The government did find enough additional resources for science, but despite its dire need, the NCN got nothing”, says Professor Błocki.
Out of these additional resources, 1.8 billion were slated, i.e., for additional subsidies. The budget of ministerial programmes was increased by 87 million, that of the Łukasiewicz Research Network by 60 million, with 122 million going to “other activities”.
In 2015, the state special purpose subsidy for the NCN and its research-funding mission stood at 871 million zlotys. Three years later, it increased to 1.226 billion. In 2022, the NCN received 1.392 billion zlotys and the figure did not increase any further in 2023.
More information about the NCN budget situation
Optimally, the NCN should be able to ensure a success rate of 25-30% in all its calls, similar to that in other foreign agencies of this kind. Current estimates suggest that a 25% success rate can only be achieved if the NCN subsidy increases to 1.77 billion zlotys in 2024, to c. 1.94 billion in 2025 and to more than 2 billion in 2026.
In 2021, the numerical success rate in the two NCN calls in question (OPUS 21, PRELUDIUM 20) was 18% and 22%, respectively. Funding was awarded to more than 900 researchers. In 2022 (OPUS 23, PRELUDIUM 21), the figures dropped to, respectively, 13% and 12%. Only 570 researchers won grants. This year, even fewer projects will be funded.
