We are pleased to announce the OPUS 26 + LAP/Weave call for research projects, including international cooperation under the Weave programme, and SONATA 19 for PhD holders. The total budget of the two calls is PLN 400 million.

Both calls are designed to fund basic research projects conducted at Polish research institutions. The calls do not have any specific theme; proposals may come from any scientific discipline. Projects will be evaluated by experts in the field and their budgets may include salaries, scholarships, research trips, research equipment and other necessary materials.

Researchers may apply either as representatives of their home institution or as natural persons. For calls that open on the same day, one can act as a principal investigator in only one proposal submitted to OPUS or OPUS LAP or SONATA.

September edition of the OPUS call: the NCN as the lead agency under the Weave programme

OPUS is traditionally open to all researchers, regardless of how far ahead they are in their careers. It pits experienced researchers against early-stage researchers. OPUS projects can be carried out with or without foreign partners or with the use of large international research equipment. In the September round, we will additionally open up the possibility of securing grants for international bilateral or trilateral projects under LAP/Weave, which means the call will also be open to projects that include teams from Austria, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Germany, Switzerland, Luxembourg and Belgium-Flanders, who will apply for funding in parallel to their respective research-funding agencies.

Alongside the PI, OPUS teams may include other members, such as students and PhD students, as well as post-docs and researchers (senior researcher, not applicable in OPUS LAP projects). The terms and conditions of the call do not specify the maximum size of the team, but team composition and qualifications will be analysed by experts in the course of proposal assessment.

OPUS projects may take 12, 24, 36 or 48 months. Projects conducted in cooperation with partners from Austria, Switzerland, Slovenia, Luxembourg and Belgium-Flanders may last 24, 36 or 48, while those with German and Czech teams: 24 or 36 months. There is no lower or upper limit of funding available to a single OPUS project, but all project costs must be well justified and cost eligibility will be carefully evaluated by NCN experts.

The budget of the call is PLN 300 million.

SONATA for PhD holders

SONATA 19 is designed to support early-stage researchers who have earned their PhD 2 to 7 years prior and allow them to conduct innovative research. To qualify as a PI under this round, the applicant must have earned their degree between 1 January 2016 and 31 December 2021 – or earlier, in certain cases specified in the terms and conditions. Their scientific achievements must include at least one paper published or accepted for publication, and in the field of art, at least one artistic achievement or achievement in research in art.

Projects may take 12, 24 or 36 months. The team may include additional members, such as students, PhD students and post-docs selected through an open call. There is no lower or upper budget limit. A SONATA grant can only be won once.

The budget of the call is PLN 100 million.

Proposal submission procedure

Proposals under OPUS 26 + LAP/Weave and SONATA 19 can be submitted via the OSF submission system until 4 pm on 15 December 2023. For OPUS LAP projects, each foreign team involved in the project must also submit a funding proposal its respective partner institution.

Merit-based review

On Monday, 11 September, 49 ERC grant winners published an open letter with an appeal “to maintain the current, independent, expert-based model of the NCN”. The next day, 49 winners of the FNP followed suit. And on 15 September, yet another appeal in defence of the NCN was made to the {resident and the prime minister in an open letter by 95 FNP fellows.

They emphasised that the NCN has given many researchers an opportunity to “conduct ground-breaking research that contributed to the advancement of Polish science and strengthened our position in the world”. “Most of us have been able to do research thanks to the funding from the National Science Centre, which has helped us achieve international success. Modelled on the European Research Council, the NCN has now become the most important basic research-funding agency in Poland. Its political independence, transparency and high quality standards have made it one of the crucial instruments for supporting science in our country”, they wrote.

More information from Nauka w Polsce.

“More than half of our funding goes to early-stage researchers. In the highly hierarchical Polish system, we give them a breath of freedom and the independence that comes with an ability to build a research team of their own. This is the great value of our agency, and it should not go to waste”, says Professor Zbigniew Błocki in an interview published by “Forum Akademickie” on 12 September.

Zbigniew Błocki, photo credit: Michał Łepecki Moderated by Mariusz Karwowski, the interview addresses the relationship of the NCN with the Ministry of Education and Science. “We have never experienced such a massive attack before. The minister has openly criticised the NCN in public statements, announced a change in its status and, early in August, even mentioned that the NCN might be shut down altogether this autumn. Interestingly, in a written response to our activity report, issued at the end of August, he admitted that the NCN did deliver on its mission and achieve the goals of Polish research policy”, says Prof. Zbigniew Błocki.

Karwowski also asks about the appointment of a new NCN Director. A quick reminder: in February, the NCN Council passed a resolution to submit the candidacy of Prof. Krzysztof Jóźwiak for approval to the minister, The second term of Prof. Błocki ended in early March and he has since served as the NCN’s acting director.

“We proposed a meeting, which could be held in our offices or at the Ministry of Science and Education, to discuss various issues concerning the NCN, including the appointment of the new director and a budget increase. We had already extended such invitations before, but the minister has turned a deaf ear to our appeals for months now. Our hands are practically tied”, Błocki reveals.

The interview also touches on aspects such as the agency’s proposal evaluation criteria, open access policy, changes in programmes, communication with the research community and the principles of NCN’s operations.

“Recently we have had to expend a lot of energy on constantly fighting to remain independent. The situation we are in today imposes a certain narrative on our part, but I understand that an institution like ours needs to evolve. I am thinking, for instance, of reforming the review system or developing a more comprehensive method of evaluating the research record component. I don’t believe researchers should be judged on their publications alone; there are other achievements that could also be taken into account. The NCN closely cooperates with similar agencies outside Poland; we pay close attention to what they’re doing, participate in discussions and try to keep up with the changes in the world. However, what I will continue to stand by at all costs is that scientific excellence should be kept at the core of our mission”, he adds.

The full text of the interview with Prof. Z. Błocki can be found in the online edition of “Forum Akademickie” (in Polish).

“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.

Together with the Biodiversa+ European Partnership for Biodiversity, we are pleased to announce an international call for proposals: “Nature-Based Solutions for Biodiversity, Human Well-being and Transformative Change” (BiodivNBS). The total budget available to Polish teams is EUR 1 million.

BiodivNBS is an international call for proposals focused on interdisciplinary research in the field of biodiversity protection. Its purpose is to promote nature-based solutions, support research into such initiatives and campaign for their inclusion in policy-making on a local, regional and national level. An important element of the call is its support for education and civic participation in initiatives aimed at environmental protection and biodiversity.

Proposals submitted to BiodivNBS must address one or more of the following three topics:

1. Synergies and trade-offs of Nature-Based solutions in the context of human well-being
2. Nature-Based solutions mitigating anthropogenic drivers of biodiversity loss
3. The contribution of Nature-Based solutions for just transformative change

The call is open to international consortia composed of at least three research teams from at least three participating countries. The PI of the Polish team must hold a PhD degree (minimum).

Participating countries: Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada (Québec), Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Georgia, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Morocco (to be confirmed), the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Tunisia, Turkey (to be confirmed).

The call is divided into two stages. At stage 1, Polish teams, in tandem with their international partners, need to submit joint pre-proposals; the deadline is 10 November 2023 (15:00 CET). The best research teams will then be invited to submit full proposals at stage 2, which ends on 9 April 2024 (15:00 CEST). If the Polish team makes the cut for stage 2, its PI will also be required to prepare a domestic proposal focused specifically on the Polish component of the project. Full proposals will undergo merit-based review by an international team of experts appointed jointly by all the research-funding agencies involved in the call. The results of BiodivNBS are to be announced in the autumn of 2024.

Project budgets may go toward funding team salaries, salaries and scholarships for students and PhD candidates, research equipment and other necessary project expenses. Projects may last 36 months.

If you’re interested in the call, you can join a webinar about the proposal submission process, organised by Biodiversa+ on 26 September 2023 (13.00 – 15.00 CEST). Sign up here.

“We want to pursue our ambitions and our research here in Poland. If the stated radical change in the research-funding model is implemented, it will deliver a hard blow to Polish science”, ERC grant holders write in an open letter to the President and the Prime Minister of Poland. The letter has been signed by 49 researchers and comes in response to the changes in the status of the NCN recently announced by the Ministry of Education and Science.

The Ministry of Education and Science has been preparing the ground for this change for many months. Several weeks ago, during the 13th International Interdisciplinary Research Seminar “Ideas – Man – Philosophy” in Stary Sącz, Professor Przemysław Czarnek, Minister of Education and Science, announced that after the upcoming parliamentary elections, which are scheduled for this autumn, the National Science Centre will be shut down and fused into a single central institution with the National Centre for Research and Development and the Medical Research Agency.

ERC grant holders working at Polish host institutions have voiced their protest, emphasising that the NCN is an institution modelled on European basic research-funding agencies, politically independent and managed by the research community.

“After many years at leading international research centres, many of us decided to relocate back to Poland and build their research teams and programmes here, rather than elsewhere. Often, this decision was dictated by the fact that Poland had the NCN, along with its independent, merit-based system of basic research funding”, the researchers write in their open letter.

Since the founding of the European Research Council (2007), Polish researchers have brought home a total of 75 ERC grants in all categories. 11 of them have won an ERC grant more than once.

The signatories of the open letter in defence of the NCN believe that the opportunity to work in projects funded by the agency early on in their career helped them build the research potential they needed to later successfully apply for ERC grants. “The NCN has spent years supporting thousands of talented and ambitious Polish researchers at different career levels. Without its support, their work may no longer be possible, which can do great harm to research in Poland”, they observe.

“We want the Polish economy to grow thanks to top-quality research. We want Poland to be recognised worldwide as a country with high research and technology potential. This is why we appeal to you, Mr President and Mr Prime Minister, to maintain the current, independent, expert-based model of the NCN”, they conclude.

On Wednesday, 11 October 2023, we will present the NCN Awards for 2023. As many as 44 candidates are in the running for this top distinction this year.

11th edition

The NCN Award is given to researchers under the age of 40, who are affiliated with Polish research institutions and boast a strong basic research and publication record in one of the following three panels: Arts, Humanities and Social sciences (HS), Physical Sciences and Engineering (ST), and Life Sciences (NZ). The main criteria for the selection process are scientific excellence and international recognition.

The jury consists of NCN Council Members and the NCN Director. This year, nearly 700 people were eligible to nominate candidates including, e.g., previous NCN Award winners, former NCN Council members and other outstanding researchers.

Each eligible researcher can only name one candidate. An important condition is that they have not collaborated, taken part in any joint endeavours or published a paper together in the past 5 years. In addition, they should not have any familial or professional relationship and researchers cannot nominate their current or former PhD students.

This year, the NCN received 53 nominations, including 44 candidates (some were nominated by more than one person). Nominees include 20 researchers in Physical Sciences and Engineering, 16 in Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences and 8 in Life Sciences. Winners will be officially announced on 11 October 2023 during the 2023 NCN Award ceremony held in the Gallery of 19th-century Polish Art in the Sukiennice, part of the National Museum in Kraków. As always, the ceremony will be hosted by Grażyna Torbicka.

The event will start at 6 p.m. and will be streamed live. In the weeks that follow, winners will deliver a series of lectures, which can also be watched online.

The most prestigious award for the young

The award was first given in 2013; to date, it has already gone to 30 talented researchers. Last year’s winners emphasise that it has given them a great opportunity to promote their research nationwide.

“The award has helped me disseminate my research on how human behaviour impacts climate change. I feel we tend to marginalise the impact of our behaviour and consumer choices on climate change, while even small changes can help us counteract these phenomena”, says Prof. Karolina Safarzyńska from the University of Warsaw, winner of the 2022 NCN Award for Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.

“When I won the award, I was literally inundated with requests for lectures, which makes me very happy. I focus on a rather neglected aspect of forest demography: seed production and recruitment, and it’s important to me that so many people can now hear why it’s worth looking into these phenomena”, says Prof. Michał Bogdziewicz from the Adam Mickiewicz University of Poznań, the winner of the award for Life Sciences.

Prof. Piotr Wcisło from the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, the winner of the award for Physical Sciences and Engineering, points out that the award can also have a positive effect on the overall image of researchers and interest in academia as a career. “Today, we are witnessing a crisis of interest in research. The world offers many attractive options, so it’s important to shape a positive image of researchers: not as solitary, older men holed up in an office, but as modern entrepreneurs who use ultra-advanced technologies, enjoy interesting career opportunities, and travel the world. It seems to me that this is exactly the image that this award paints”, he argues.

General audience lectures and research projects

As part of NCN’s cooperation with the Copernicus Foundation, winners of the 2022 NCN Award delivered lectures that were streamed for a general audience on YouTube. Interestingly, the lectures also attracted new research proposals! “I really think these lectures are a great idea”, says Prof. Bogdziewicz, “I received a lot of questions, and I was even asked to write several popular science articles. I also got an invitation to work on creating a computer game. I can’t really say much about it just yet, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed”. Prof. Piotr Wcisło’s lecture has been watched by more than 135,000 people thus far. “The event has really good viewership, especially for a lecture in quantum mechanics! The initiative has also attracted the attention of people in the community of physicists, chemists, and engineers”, he comments.

Prof. Safarzyńska is currently starting out on a new NCN project under the SONATA BIS scheme. She will build a new team to work on critical social points that may prevent climate change.

Prof. Bogdziewicz heads the Forest Biology Centre at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, working on a project funded from an ERC (European Research Council) grant he won last year.

Prof. Wcisło is involved in two big grant projects: the ERC Starting Grant and NCN’s SONATA BIS. The ERC grant will allow him to trap hydrogen molecules for the first time to validate quantum theory with a high degree of precision. His SONATA BIS project, on the other hand, is almost entirely devoted to theoretical research on quantum descriptions of molecular collisions.

Online lectures by previous winners

Media support

Dr hab. inż. Maciej Trusiak, Faculty of Mechatronics of the Warsaw University of Technology, specialises in optical nanoscopy. He has previously won five NCN calls: PRELUDIUM, PRELUDIUM BIS, SONATA and 2x OPUS, and will now use his ERC grant to fund a new project entitled “Lensless Label-free Nanoscopy” (NaNoLens), which focuses on the advancement of lensless holographic microscopy. Lensless holographic microscopy is a technology that successfully transcends the limitations of optical nanoscopy when it comes to imaging live cells (a procedure that requires cell labelling and has a limited field of vision), but its low resolution continues to pose a challenge. Thanks to the ERC StG, Professor Trusiak and his team will be able to work on expanding the field of vision in this technology with the use of deep UV. Their 5-year project was awarded EUR 1.5 million. You can read more about it on the website of the Warsaw University of Technology.

The other Poland-based winner of this year’s ERC Starting Grants is Dr inż. Łukasz Sterczewski from the Faculty of Electronics, Photonics, and Microsystems of the Wrocław University of Technology, who has also previously completed projects funded by the NCN. In his day-to-day work, he focuses on terahertz waves, one of the least studied parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. Because of their unique properties, terahertz waves have attracted the interest of researchers all over the world, but it is still often impossible to use them outside the lab due to various limitations that have to do with technology and equipment. A team headed by Dr Sterczewski will work on a project devoted to terahertz spectrometers based on integrated optical frequency combs, which are able to work at room temperature. Their plan is to develop miniature devices to allow terahertz waves to be used quickly and effectively in many situations in daily life. The budget of the TeraERC project is EUR 1.5 million. You can read more about it on the website of the Wrocław University of Technology.

In this edition, the European Research Council awarded a total of EUR 628 million to projects from 24 different countries across Europe. ERC Starting grants are available to researchers who have earned their PhD degree 2 to 7 years prior. Projects can take up to 5 years. The ERC supports innovative ideas in all disciplines of science.

To date, a total of EUR 64 million worth in grants has gone to 44 researchers working at 17 research centres throughout Poland. Polish institutions have completed or continue to work on 75 ERC grants with a total budget of EUR 126 million.

Proposal forms for Polish research teams for the IMPRESS-U call are now available in the OSF submission system.

International Multilateral Partnerships for Resilient Education and Science System in Ukraine (IMPRESS-U) is a call for research projects and is carried out in a multilateral collaboration under the IMPRESS-U programme pursuant to the Lead Agency Procedure (“LAP”) with the National Science Foundation (NSF) acting as the lead agency in charge of merit-based evaluation of proposals.

The Ministry of Education and Science decided to give the nod to our agency and its work and approve our 2022 Report. Previously, the document had also received a positive review from the Main Council of Science and Higher Education and the Research Policy Committee.

The National Science Centre is an agency whose main role is to support basic research. It regularly announces new calls for proposals, offers doctoral scholarships and post-doctoral fellowships, cooperates with leading foreign research-funding institutions and develops links of multilateral cooperation in Europe.

The 2022 NCN Report and the Activity Evaluation Report were drawn up in February and approved by the NCN Council in March this year, followed by their approval by the Main Council of Science and Higher Education. In a document dated 24 August, the report was addressed by the Minister of Science and Higher Education; Professor Przemysław Czarnek emphasised that the NCN correctly carried out its basic mission.

The review of the Minister of Education and Science reads: “The National Science Centre strives with great dynamism to achieve the goals of Polish research policy, launching programmes for young, talented researchers and getting involved in international research cooperation … In developing its calls, the NCN has always lent an ear and responded to the voices and suggestions of the research community and continually expanded its grant portfolio, adjusting its rules and call procedures accordingly”. The Minister also took a positive view of the large proportion of foreign researchers among NCN reviewers and the impact of extensive international cooperation on the internationalisation of Polish research. He also applauded, e.g., the NCN’s information policy and its consistent communications, including those concerning its calls for proposals, call results and active cooperation with beneficiaries.

Year 2022 in figures

“For the past 12 years, the National Science Centre has introduced many positive changes to improve the quality of Polish research. A key challenge for the future is to maintain and further develop the institution so that it can continue to serve our researchers”, says Professor Zbigniew Błocki, NCN Director, “An independent, transparent grant agency of this kind, which adheres to international standards, is an indispensable element of a modern research-funding scheme in any developed country today”, he adds.

NCN calls that ended in 2022 attracted more than 10.5 thousand proposals: nearly 10 thousand qualified for merit-based evaluation. 2056 of these were awarded grants, including 176 within the framework of international initiatives.

The NCN cooperated with more than 2.1 thousand experts (researchers) who sat on Expert Teams evaluating proposals under 25 discipline panels (disciplines or groups of disciplines). At the second stage of evaluation, proposals were reviewed by nearly 10 thousand external peer reviewers (96%).

Based on agreements signed with NCN call winners, nearly 10,200 research projects, fellowships, scholarships and research activities were completed in 2022.

Almost all (99.9%) of the designated subsidy (1.392 billion zlotys) from the Ministry of Science and Higher Education went directly to researchers in 2022.

Their projects are hosted by universities and research centres all over Poland.

54% of the total funding awarded by the NCN in 2022 went to early-stage researchers. “NCN projects give them a chance to strike out on their own, build new research teams and move around in often excessively hierarchical Polish research environments”, comments Prof. Zbigniew Błocki.

International cooperation is another important part of the NCN’s mission. We are a trusted partner of many foreign research institutions, including prestigious centres such as the Max Planck Society, with which we collaborate on the Dioscuri programme. We are also active members of Science Europe and the Global Research Council, as well as coordinators of two European networks: QuantERA  (Quantum Technologies) and CHANSE (Humanities and Social Sciences).

Low budgets

At the moment, the NCN faces an uncertain future and struggles with a low budget that only allows it to fund a small proportion of submitted projects.

Over the past five years, between 2018 and 2023, the annual designated subsidy for the NCN has increased by only c. 13% and now fails to meet the demands of the research community. Today, the NCN is able to fund only as little as 13% of submitted projects.

In his introduction to the 2022 NCN Report, the Director wrote: “...the recent precarious position of the NCN within the research-funding system in Poland, including serious problems with inadequate subsidies, has increased our uncertainty as to the future and continuity of this institution. Importantly, however, despite all odds, the NCN continues to work and uphold the best practices developed since its founding”.