Eurodoc Open Letter to European Parliament on Horizon Europe

Eurodoc has sent an open letter to the members of the European Parliament on the proposal for a regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council establishing Horizon Europe – the Framework Programme for Research and Innovation for 2012-2027, that will succeed Horizon 2020. In our letter, we call upon Members of the Parliament to:

• Increase the budgets for funding programs, in particular for Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) and European Research Council (ERC), that are currently not sufficient to adequately support early-career researchers and foster excellence in Europe, as we already asked in our recommendation on Horizon Europe.
• Keep Excellence as Core Criterion and Strengthen Open Science, through targeted funding programmes to promote and innovate Open Science practices, application evaluations to incorporate Open Science practices by researchers, and adequate training and support of researchers for Open Science in Horizon Europe.
• Impose Fewer Legal Barriers and Put Science (Not Business) First, by imposing as few legal restrictions as possible on research and innovation in Europe, as we also previously commented on proposals for a directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, and not overly prioritising the commercialisation of research and innovation.
• Reduce Application Barriers and Improve Access to Funding, by simplification and harmonisation of rules for all research and innovation activities across European funding programmes, by widening participation, and by making the human and societal factors of research and innovation a cross-cutting issue in Horizon Europe.
• Strengthen Equality and Ensure Fair Compensation for Work, by creating targeted funding programmes for gender equality and making equality in the broad sense explicitly cross-cutting in the framework programme. A fair salary system is lastly needed which is scaled for researcher level and adjusted for country of residence.