FCT launches ERC Portugal Pre-Assessment Program

This Monday, June 19, FCT launched a new axis of the ERC-Portugal program, called ERC Portugal Pre-Assessment. This is a peer review service that FCT will make available to researchers from the national scientific community who are preparing applications for European Research Council (ERC) Calls for projects.

The ERC Portugal Pre-Assessment will follow the best international peer review practices, in which the pre-assessment model will mirror the ERC's evaluation criteria and evaluator profiles. This new program is intended to be an important tool for improving the quality of national proposals and their preparation processes. Its ultimate goal will be to increase the number of national applications to ERC Calls and to naturalize the submission of proposals to this leading European research funding agency.

Proposals will be evaluated according to the ERC's evaluation criteria for the respective Call, and the evaluations will be carried out by international experts with highly experienced profiles in evaluation processes, preferably as panel members in ERC Calls .

This program will make it possible to support submissions for the next ERC Starting Grants Call , the deadline for which is October 24, 2023. To this end, the first cycle of pre-assessment of proposals for the ERC Portugal Pre-Assessment runs until July 20, 2023 (Thursday). The proposal pre-assessment reports will be sent to the researchers by September 25, 2023, approximately one month before the end of the period for submitting proposals to the ERC Starting Grants Call , in order to constitute an effective contribution to the conclusion of the process of preparing the application to be submitted to the ERC Call .