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Prestigious European grants might be biased, study suggests

Institutional affiliations of panellists seem to skew European Research Council decisions — especially in the life sciences.
  1. Diana Kwon

    1. Diana Kwon is a freelance science journalist based in Berlin.

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Funding panels are more likely to give prestigious European Union early-career grants to applicants connected to the institutions of some of the panellists, a study of the 2014 funding round suggests.

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Nature 593, 490-491 (2021)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-01362-8

Updates & Corrections

  • Update 07 June 2021: The article has been updated to include further details about the ERC's conflict-of-interest policy and a comment from Jean-Pierre Bourguignon and the response from the authors of the paper. The ERC had initially declined to comment on the merits of the paper because it has not yet been peer reviewed.

References

  1. Mom, C. S. & Van den Besselaar, P. Preprint at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/344461606 (2021).

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