Thomas Estermann News Today

The European Commission is about to publish the full Horizon Europe Annotated Grant Agreement (AGA) this month, after several years of delay. “The (re)publication of a fully-fledged corporate AGA is imminent,” a Commission spokeswoman told Science|Business, confirming it is expected this month.

The Spanish presidency has proposed shaving as much as €5.3 billion off Horizon Europe to finance skyrocketing EU recovery fund interest rates, according to a leaked proposal seen by Science|Business. The proposal, sent to the member states last week, outlines three scenarios for cutting EU funding for 2025 - 2027, including one that suggests a cut as high as 13.5%. According to the document, EU ambassadors discussed the document at a Coreper meeting on 23 November.

EU ministers want to establish a dedicated knowledge exchange platform to help tighten security against technology espionage across the bloc. “Joint EU action is desperately needed here. We need to establish an EU playing field on knowledge security and foreign interference with a shared view on both the risks and opportunities,” said Dutch research minister Robbert Dijkgraaf. “It’s one of our top challenges and will remain with us for a long time.”

Six Hungarian universities hit with an EU ban on accessing Horizon Europe and Erasmus+ funds could have a case, according to a leading expert on Hungarian constitutional law commenting after the universities lodged appeals to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), claiming the move is unreasonable, disproportionate and lacks solid factual basis.

Politicians’ recent marshalling of public institutions for geopolitical, economic and societal ends has narrowed their room to manoeuvre, according to EUA’s autonomy scorecard

EU policymakers have reached a deal on the budget for next year, and with the focus squarely on tackling the fallout from the war in Ukraine and the energy crisis, research and innovation do not feature at the top of the policy priorities.

Horizon Europe is set for “the first significant wave” of lump sum calls in 2023 and 2024, with an estimated 20 to 25% of large scale collaborative research projects set to adopt the approach. The exact number of lump sums calls is pending the official adoption of Horizon Europe work programmes for the next two years. Most will be in pillar two of the €95.9 billion research programme, which supports transnational research.

MEPs have lifted their threat to press for a cut to the 2023 budget for the European Innovation Council (EIC), after the European Commission made moves to unlock the flow of funding to start-up companies that are due to get equity funding from the EIC Accelerator programme. “We decided not to follow in the Commission's footsteps to defund the EIC and to take the budgetary threat off the table for 2023,” Horizon Europe rapporteur Christian Ehler MEP told Science|Business.

The European Research Council (ERC) is set to introduce lump sum funding to its Advanced grants for experienced researchers starting in 2024.

Horizon Europe’s budget for next year should round off to €12.3 billion for Horizon Europe, a €100 million increase compared to the 2022 proposal. This sum will be topped up by an extra €1.8 billion in grants from the EU recovery fund, NextGenerationEU, according to the European Commission’s latest proposal.