Research organisations call for more funding for Marie Curie Actions

Thirteen organisations representing European research and innovation have come together to urge the Commission to increase the budget for the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA), the EU’s doctoral and postdoctoral training programme.

It comes amid a push by the Commission to expand the European Research Council and the European Innovation Council, which has left question marks hanging over other parts of Horizon Europe, notably collaborative research and MSCA.

Both Mario Draghi’s report on EU competitiveness, and Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s mission letters to future commissioners stress the importance of supporting researchers, but MSCA is not mentioned.

In a statement the organisations say, “[We] express our collective concern over this omission, which overlooks the programme’s essential contributions to Europe’s research, innovation and competitiveness.”

“We firmly believe MSCA is crucial to Europe's innovation and prosperity. That's why we gathered like-minded organisations to collectively call for its full recognition and reinforcement,” said Kurt Deketelaere, secretary general of the League of European Research Universities (LERU).

The statement is endorsed by associations representing universities and other research-performing organisations, including  LERU, The Guild and Science Europe, as well as the Marie Curie Alumni Association.

“MSCA nurtures talent, fosters groundbreaking research, strengthens global collaborations, and therefore has a key role in driving economic growth and securing Europe’s competitive edge in a rapidly evolving global landscape,” the statement says.

“However, the current funding is insufficient to maintain the programme’s momentum and expand its reach. We therefore urge the European Commission, Parliament and Council to recognise the MSCA's invaluable contributions by increasing its budget, while maintaining its purely bottom-up research character.”

Attractive careers

Von der Leyen’s letter to Ekaterina Zaharieva, future commissioner for start-ups, research and innovation, calls on the Bulgarian to “help strengthen and incentivise cooperation between academic, private and public sector entities to create attractive career perspectives”.

This is already the mission of the MSCA programme, through initiatives such as industrial doctorates for PhD candidates who want to develop their skills in industry, the groups note, and yet MSCA is not mentioned. “Strange, to say the least,” the statement says.

The Draghi report meanwhile proposes setting up an ‘ERC for Institutions’ programme, and creating an ‘EU Chair’ position to retain top academics by hiring them as EU officials. Research stakeholders have noted similarities with existing MSCA initiatives.

Mattias Björnmalm, secretary general of the CESAER university association, last month told Science|Business it was, “frankly surprising that MSCA is barely mentioned in the report, despite several of its key objectives and features being prominently discussed as key for future productivity and prosperity in Europe.”

“Rather than creating new structures, doubling MSCA’s funding (together with doubling of Framework Programme 10) extending its scope would be a more effective way to attract top talent and foster mobility across Europe,” Björnmalm said.

Additional investment is required to improve MSCA application success rates, which are currently a lowly 14%.

In addition to supporting individual researchers and programmes, “MSCA is proven to be a highly effective programme in making changes in the institutional and national policies and strategies, such as researchers’ employability and career prospects, recruitment and supervisory rules and guidelines, skills development in the EU,” said Ludovic Thilly, chair of Coimbra Group’s executive board.

MSCA aim to equip researchers at all stages of their careers, through mobility across borders and exposure to different sectors and disciplines. It also funds the development of doctoral and postdoctoral training programmes, as well as collaborative research projects. There is a budget of €6.6 billion under Horizon Europe.

Since it launched in 1996, 18 Nobel Prize laureates have received support and funding from MSCA. In the past decade alone, 13,500 postdoctoral fellowships were awarded, and 1,500 doctoral training programmes funded.

French physicist Anne L'Huillier, winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics, is quoted in the statement saying the MSCA was crucial at the beginning of her career. “Receiving support from MSCA to train and supervise doctoral and postdoctoral fellows within a network was very important for me. [...] I think the MSCA have helped a lot to increase networking and communication among research actors,” she said.