New government backs basic science with hike in funding

The still relatively rookie Polish government, which took office only in mid-December 2023, is continuing the push to reverse the policies of its predecessors in higher education and science.

In a recent development, the government increased the budget of the National Science Centre (NCN) by 14% to PLN1.6 billion (US$402 million). In nominal terms, the increase comes in at PLN200 million (US$50 million).

The extra money comes directly from the budget of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education – without having to amend the state budget bill.

Biggest boost in a decade

It is the biggest single budget boost for the NCN in a decade, the ministry said, pointing out that the previous administration had only increased the money pool available for the prestigious institution by just 13% in the past five years.

According to the government, that effectively meant impoverishing the NCN, as in the past five years, the total amount of funding applied for annually by scientists increased by 59%.

The effect was that the success rate – percentage of submitted projects that received funding – in recent NCN grant competitions slid to some 8% to 10%, according to figures from the latest report by the institution.

The effects of this policy showed clearly in the last editions of two flagship NCN competitions: Opus and Preludium. The success rate in the former was just over 8%, while in the latter, it was nearly 11%. For both competitions, the National Science Centre could allocate a total of PLN338 million (US$85 million).

As per the description on the NCN website, Opus is a funding opportunity intended for research proposals that may include the purchase or construction of research equipment – in other words, proposals that could be costly.

Preludium, in turn, is a funding opportunity intended for pre-doctoral researchers about to embark on their scientific careers.

Without NCN grants, Polish science would simply stagnate, says Marcin Zaród, PhD, a sociologist at the SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw, a privately funded university. He worked on NCN-funded Preludium and Etiuda grants from 2014 to 2019 while at the University of Warsaw.

“I study the social aspects of information security and digital infrastructures. My position covers both teaching and research. In my department we have less than €15,000 in annual research funds for about 30 people,” Zaród says.

“This means that internal funding does not cover even one conference fee per capita, not to mention software, fieldwork, proofreading, open access fees and the like. So grants are not cherries on top of my research job. If I do not have a research grant, I am not doing real scientific work,” Zaród says.

‘Not a one-off boost’

The government pledges that NCN’s budget boost is not a one-off.

“We will want to persuade the Polish government and the Minister of Finance to increase these subsidies for the National Science Centre every year,” Minister of Science and Higher Education Dariusz Wieczorek said in February.

To ensure support for Polish researchers and increase their opportunities globally, the optimal success rate in grant competitions should be 25% to 30%, Poland’s scientific community says.

The minister’s pledge is quite a turnaround from the plan of the previous government, which, before the elections last October that cost it power, said that the NCN and the NCBiR – the National Centre for Research and Development, another key state-run science granting institution – would be liquidated to make room for a new body under the supervision of the government.

What that supervision was going to look like became clear during the election campaign. Then-incumbent science and education minister Przemyslaw Czarnek said at the time that the oversight would make sure no “neo-Marxist” applications – such as looking at gender issues – would ever get through.

“We must curb the impulses of gender ideology at universities because indeed, especially where humanities and social sciences are concerned, there is an unrelenting ideological attack underway. Saving Polish universities from ideology will be a topic we address during the election campaign,” Czarnek said at the time in an interview for the Catholic daily Nasz Dziennik.

Meanwhile, the NCN continues its work. In late February, the institution granted PLN126 million (US$32 million) to fund seven projects (out of 56 submitted) under the Maestro programme, which focuses on “pioneering scientific research”.

The NCN will also finance 38 projects – out of 420 submitted – under the Sonata Bis scheme designed for younger scientists who are five to 12 years into their post-doctoral career.

Zaród hopes that the increase in the NCN budget will be sustained – also counter to what has been going on in the European Union in recent years.

“The irony is that every country in EU cut basic research funding through the years. Yet, they also were completely comfortable spending 10 times more money for the same research we scientists do when it’s sold by consulting companies,” he says.