A 62% surge in applications to one of the world’s most prestigious research-funding programmes could push its success rate below 5%, raising concerns that strong scientific proposals will go unfunded. The increase is partly attributed to the growing ease of preparing grant applications with artificial-intelligence tools.
When the success rate of a grant programme falls below a certain threshold, it effectively becomes a lottery.Credit: Javier Rodriguez Jimenez/Shutterstock
“These numbers are a bit frightening,” said Maria Leptin, president of the European Research Council (ERC) in Brussels. She said it was becoming increasingly difficult for staff and reviewers to handle such a large volume of applications.
The ERC’s Starting Grant programme, which gives early-career scientists up to €1.5 million (US$1.7 million) in base funding over five years, received 7,710 proposals for its 2027 grants by the 14 October deadline. That was up from 4,807 applications the previous year.
A maximum of 373 grants is available, down from 421 last year because of funding constraints. The success rate for grants in 2026 is less than 5%, compared with 8.8%. “It’s almost a lottery,” said Devan Mehta, a systems and synthetic biologist at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, who applied for a Starting Grant this year.
Source: European Research Council
Applications surge
The ERC is the European Union’s main funder of basic research, with an annual budget of almost €3 billion. It offers three grant categories for individual researchers at different career stages: Starting, Consolidator and Advanced. Applications to both programmes have increased significantly in recent years.
Lynn Kamerlin, a molecular biologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, said similar increases in research-grant applications were occurring worldwide. Research has examined grant success rates.
The ideal success rate for a grant programme is about 20%, Kamerlin said. Below that level, it becomes increasingly difficult to identify the strongest research without relying on subjective judgements, potentially leaving a substantial amount of good science underfunded. “People don’t know the difference between the top six, eight and 12 percent,” she said.
One possible approach, Kamerlin suggested, would be for a panel to select the top 20% of applications and then choose the winners randomly, as some funders already do. Anything below that standard, she said, “is just a lottery ticket.”
AI adds pressure to reviews
The growing availability of AI tools is one factor behind the increase in applications. “Text generation has become very easy,” Kamerlin said. That has placed considerable pressure on the funding system because applicants can produce statements that “can say things that are complete nonsense.” As a result, reviewing applications will require greater scrutiny.
Source: www.nature.com
