ERC Peer Review
The ERC’s peer-review evaluation process must command the confidence of the research community and is central to the achievement of the ERC’s objectives. The ERC ScC divided the full range of scientific disciplines into three major domains, with budgets allotted to each based on the weighted average distribution of national funding in scientifically strong countries worldwide: 34% for life sciences, 14% for social sciences/humanities and 39% for physical/engineering sciences. The ScC strongly encourages interdisciplinary proposals, for which a notional 13% of the budget is reserved, if sufficient top-quality proposals are submitted. The ERC philosophy towards interdisciplinary proposals is to apply mainstreaming, i.e. to have them reviewed by sufficiently knowledgeable panelists and/or external reviewers but to ultimately rank them competitively within their primary panel. Clearly, identifying and rewarding true interdisciplinarity is a challenging yet worthwhile task and one would expect that the ERC, being a novel and learning organization, would likely adapt and refine its procedures vis-a-vis the treatment of interdisciplinary proposals as experience is gained.
The peer review in the three domains is carried out by a total of 25 panels led by Panel Chairs whose scientific status gives credibility to the selection process. The configuration of the evaluation panels was finalized by the Scientific Council during the first semester of 2008, taking account of the experience from the first Starting Grant call. For the Advanced Grant, two sets of panels have been put in place, operating in alternate years. This moderates the workload on individual reviewers and means that they are not excluded from applying to the ERC on alternate years when they are not involved in panels. There are currently thus about 900 ERC panel members; together with the 2000 external reviewers they constitute the backbone of the ERC evaluation structure.
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