A little over 338 million zlotys in funding will go to 407 projects selected under OPUS 25 and PRELUDIUM 22. This is the lowest number of winning projects in these calls since the NCN was founded. Because our budget has been frozen, success rates in this iteration of OPUS and PRELUDIUM fell to just 8.06% and 10.73%, respectively.
OPUS and PRELUDIUM are two very well-known calls from the NCN portfolio, which allow Polish researchers to carry out basic research at Polish host institutions. OPUS grants go toward funding complex projects that may last several years, require large research teams, major international research equipment or collaboration with international partners – all this is available to any researcher, no matter how far they have advanced in their career. PRELUDIUM is a unique call that allows early-stage researchers (without a PhD degree) to gain their first experience coordinating a project, which may take up to three years.
“Since the first days of the National Science Centre, we have aimed at building a complete research career path that would prize researcher independence and growth. Many outstanding scientists working in Poland today belong to what we call ‘the NCN generation’, i.e., researchers who first struck out on their own with a PRELUDIUM project and then went on to use our grants to build their own research teams, which conduct top world-level research today”, says Krzysztof Jóźwiak, NCN Director.
PRELUDIUM 22 ranking list (.pdf)
OPUS 25 and PRELUDIUM 22 in figures
These have been record iterations of these calls in every sense, including the negative. Over the past two years, due to a very low research-funding budget available to the NCN, the number of awarded grants has been steadily declining.
Under OPUS 25, funding was awarded to 176 out of 2184 proposals, which means that the success rate dropped to just 8.06%, much lower than for previous iterations. OPUS 25 winners will receive a total of c. 301.6 million zlotys. This is also less than the figure for previous calls: two years ago, OPUS 21 awarded 559 million zlotys to 417 researchers, OPUS 22 – 500 million zlotys to 350 researchers, and OPUS 23 – 401.5 million to 266 researchers. In May 2023, the corresponding figures dropped to just 224 researchers and 364.4 million zlotys. Success rates also steadily declined over time, falling from almost 19% to a meagre 11.7%.
The figures for PRELUDIUM are just as telling. In the 22nd iteration of the call, grants will go to 1 out of every 10 young researchers who applied; the ranking list features 231 projects with a total budget of c. 36.5 million zlotys (for a success rate of 10.73%). Here, as elsewhere, the past two years have witnessed a significant decline: under PRELUDIUM 20, we funded 495 projects with 77 million zlotys (22% success rate), and in PRELUDIUM 21 – 258 projects worth a total of 41.2 million (12% success rate).
We have been warning about this radical drop in success rates for a long time.
“It is the first time in our history that we are only able to fund such a small number of projects. We all know what the consequences will be: in light of the instability in the funding system, talented Polish researchers will begin to look for greener pastures abroad. This is why the state budget for the next few years should absolutely prioritise an increase in the NCN’s basic research budget”, emphasises Prof. Krzysztof Jóźwiak, NCN Director.
NCN budget, call budget and success rates
The NCN should ensure an optimal success rate of 25-30% in order to be able to fund the best projects and boost our chances of success in the international scientific arena. The total research-funding budget of the NCN, as we have said time after time, has remained nearly the same in the last six years. Over the same period, the amount of funding requested by researchers has increased by several dozen percent. Today, the NCN grant fails by a large margin to meet the needs of the Polish research community.
At the NCN, we have long been lobbying for an increase in the grant-in-aid for research funding.
“In recent years, the qualifications of researchers have considerably increased; they now plan for very ambitious, high-quality projects, often in cooperation with many international partners, which obviously requires more funding. This is a good sign and the natural development of research in our country. At the NCN, we are campaigning for more funding not for our institution as such, but for the researchers who benefit from our grants and who, thanks to our grants, want to continue their work in Poland. We are grateful for all the support we have received from the research community thus far, but we need to ask for even more. This time, we can try and influence the public authorities to increase research funding”, emphasised the NCN Director.
Waiting lists of highly rated projects
In connection to its campaign to acquire more funding for the NCN from 2024 onward, the NCN Council, in communication with the Director, passed a resolution that allows Expert Teams, for the first time in the history of OPUS and PRELUDIUM calls, to draw up waiting lists. The waiting lists include projects that earned a high score in merit-based evaluation and only failed to win a grant due to our limited resources. Similar waiting lists will be drawn up in upcoming calls, such as SONATA BIS 13 and MAESTRO 15, which will conclude soon.
We decided to take this step in anticipation of a potential budget increase in 2024 and in subsequent years. In domestic NCN programmes, call procedures take around 5 months from the submission deadline to grant decision. Winning projects can usually go ahead 8-9 months after the end of the submission period.
The NCN budget has an annual billing cycle. This means that any resources we do not use in a given year must be paid back to the Ministry of Education and Science by the last working day of December; they may not be carried over to the next year. “Waiting lists allow us to spend a potential budget increase on highly-rated projects in 2024”, Prof. Jóźwiak explains.
Once the National Science Centre has received additional resources, the NCN Council will decide to which calls they will be added. The Council may pass a resolution to modify the budget of such call, depending on when and how much more resources will be awarded to the National Science Centre by the Ministry of Education and Science.
I was put on a waiting list. What does that mean?
Researchers who were put on a waiting list receive a negative funding decision, with a caveat that they are on the waiting list. They are not in any way restricted in the exercise of their rights in the call procedure; they can still appeal against the decision and submit proposals in other calls.
If the budget of the NCN is increased and the NCN Council passes a resolution to commit additional resources to specific calls, waiting list projects will be funded in the order in which they have been ranked by Expert Teams. How many waiting list projects are funded will depend on the sum added to the project by the Council. The PIs of successful projects will then receive a new funding decision and a relevant announcement will be published on the NCN website.
Humans, nature and the world in selected OPUS and PRELUDIUM projects
NCN call winners work on the most pressing issues of the 21st century, such as those concerning healthcare and modern lifestyle diseases. An OPUS grant for Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences was awarded to Prof. Dr hab. Mikołaj Czajkowski from the University of Warsaw, who will work on a project devoted to the economic value of health and, in particular, scope effects and risk preferences in mortality and morbidity valuation. Dr hab. Monika Bzowska from the Jagiellonian University, one of the winners in Life Sciences, will focus on how to attack cellular proteins that are not, but could be, the target of cancer therapies. Her team plans to develop and describe an advanced nanoplatform for the intracellular delivery of specific monoclonal antibodies. Under the Physical Sciences and Engineering panel, Dr inż. Daria Podstawczyk from the Wrocław University of Technology will use her OPUS grant to design, synthesize and model microalgae-containing biomaterials for the 3D coaxial bioprinting of oxygen-releasing engineered living materials.
Many problems addressed by the winners of PRELUDIUM involve natural phenomena that are or could be harnessed by people for practical applications. In Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, Albert Kusi from the University of Warsaw has proposed investigating the preferences and willingness to pay for the use and non-use values of artificial reefs in Poland, considering distance decay, environmental attitudes and different elicitation methods. In her Life Sciences project, Agata Zaremba from the Poznań University of Life Sciences will look into the potential application of pumpkin, cauliflower, broccoli and carrot as carriers of iodine for food fortification, while in the Physical Sciences and Engineering panel, Krzysztof Szewczyk from the S. Leszczyński Institute of Geography and Spatial Organization of the Polish Academy of Sciences will study fire, burned areas and charcoal; he will perform the charcoal-data modelling of a burned area, conduct a cross-validation of fires and analyse the charcoal signal.