A Couple of Thoughts on the Results of the Rannis Applications

As you probably all know already, the results of the latest round of grant applications are out.  The Rannis news item on the web states the following figures:

Á fundi stjórnar Rannsóknasjóðs miðvikudaginn 16. janúar 2008 var úthlutað tæplega 300 milljónum króna til nýrra rannsóknaverkefna á árinu 2008. Þrjár tegundir styrkja voru í boði: Öndvegisstyrkir, Rannsóknastöðustyrkir og Verkefnastyrkir. Alls bárust 17 umsóknir um Öndvegisstyrki og voru 4 þeirra styrktar; 20 umsóknir bárust um Rannsóknastöðustyrki og voru 7 þeirra styrktar; 204 umsóknir bárust um Verkefnastyrki og voru 60 þeirra styrktar. Alls barst því 241 umsókn og var 71 styrkt, eða rétt innan við þriðjungur.

In the scientific area to which my research belongs (Engineering, Science and Technology), Rannis selected 12 new projects for funding and awarded 48421K ISK to those projects. In 2007, 11 projects were funded in that subject area for a total of 34120K ISK. So there has been a welcome increase in the available funding. I do not think that I am stating anything particularly controversial, however, by going on record as saying that the amount of financing is still way below par. When I told one my most prolific Dutch co-workers how much money I got in this round, his reaction was "Can you support one PhD student with that amount of money?" He did not know that the money was supposed to support one PhD student and one MSc student, and that no travel money was involved

To put things into perspective, let me point out that  about 48000K ISK is less than BRICS, a single centre of excellence of the Danish National Research Foundation, received each year from 1994 till about 2006. By way of comparison, you may also see what the Academy of Finland (one of the funding sources in that country) awards each year: 

The Academy annually makes funding decisions worth around 260 million euros. Each year Academy-funded projects account for a total of some 3,000 person years.

So, I am very happy to see an increase in the available funding (kudos to whoever made this possible!), but I think that these are initial baby-steps, and much more remains to be done. If you can lobby on behalf of the scientific community, please do! (And don't forget the other worthy causes you should lobby for that have already been mentioned on this blog )

I believe that we also need to differentiate the types of funding (not just project-based funding) as it is done elsewhere, but this will be the topic for another post. For the moment, let me close by congratulating the contributors to this blog for having received a few grants from Rannis in 2008. Well done, guys!