ERC Portugal Pre-Assessment Programme launched

The Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT – Science and Technology Foundation) launched a new axis of the ERC-Portugal programme, called ERC Portugal Pre-Assessment. This is a peer evaluation service that the FCT will offer to researchers from the Portuguese scientific community that are preparing their applications to European Research Council projects.

The ERC Portugal Pre-Assessment will follow the peer evaluation international best practice, where the pre-assessment model will reflect ERC evaluation criteria and evaluator profiles. 

The aim of this new programme is to become an important instrument to improve the quality of the national proposal and their preparation processes. The end ai mis to increase the number of national applications to ERC competitions and make submitting proposals as natural as possible, as this is the main European agency funding research.

The proposals will be assessed according to the ERC assessment criteria for the competitions, and the assessments are carried out by international experts with great experience in assessment processes, preferably as members of the ERC competition panels.

This programme will support applications to the upcoming ERC Starting Grants, the submission deadline for which ends on 24 October of this year. For this, the first pre-assessment cycle for the ERC Portugal Pre-Assessment proposals runs until 20 July. 

The proposal pre-assessment reports are sent to researchers by 25 September, roughly a month before the period for submitting the proposals to the ERC Starting Grants ends, so it is an effective contribution to concluding the process to prepare the application to the ERC competition.