Oversubscription and Evaluation in Horizon 2020 - DIGITALEUROPE's recommendations

WHAT IS THE PROBLEM?

As the statistics in the latest Annual Monitoring Report show, oversubscription has become a serious problem in Horizon 2020. We see a decrease in the success rate of eligible full proposals from an average of 21% in FP7 to 13.2% in 2014 to finally 11.8% in 2015. The situation is even more dire for LEIT ICT (from 9.2% in 2014 to 6.7% in 2015). To improve the likelihood of being selected, researchers spend increasing amounts of time on writing and optimizing proposals. However, their efforts are more and more likely to be wasted as we increasingly see cases of proposals being rejected with an evaluation score at the maximum available score (e.g. 14.5/15).