The Minister for Science and Innovation, Diana Morant, today presented the Fortalece program, which aims to guarantee stable funding for research groups.
The initiative will be launched this year with a pilot plan endowed with 30 million euros and aimed at health research institutions accredited by the Carlos III Health Institute, which may receive up to 400,000 euros every four years.
This program, which the minister announced a few weeks ago in the Congress of Deputies and the details of which she presented today at a press conference, will add “new resources” that will make it possible to “strengthen and reinforce” the current science funding model.
Currently, the R D i system finances scientific projects that compete in national calls. The new program will, at the same time, allow resources to be provided to research groups with scientific results “relevant to society”, Morant pointed out.
The minister recalled that the Severo Ochoa and María de Maeztu programs -endowed with 73 million euros- are a similar initiative that enables centers of excellence to be financed.
The new program represents a change in the current funding system intended to be aimed at research groups, regardless of the centers in which they work. It is a “necessary but also complex and deep” program and, for this reason, “it will be tested and implemented over time,” Morant said.
The minister explained that the program is based on “trust” in researchers, so “once in it, they will receive 100,000 euros from January 1, 2024 and only at the end of the program, four years later, will they have to present and justify the results obtained”.
According to the ministry’s calculations, this first call for the program will benefit some 72 research groups that “will have the funding ready on January 1, 2024, January 1, 2025, January 1, 2026 and January 1, 2027”.
The program accompanies “one of the main milestones of the Science Law,” which was to provide stable and growing funding for science, while reducing bureaucracy and allowing scientists “more flexibility and creativity.”
Morant has advanced that the first call will come out “in May or June” and will be launched in the health research institutes accredited by the Carlos III Health Institute, “because they are centers that today cannot be presented to the María de Maeztu and Severo Ochoa”.
In addition, these centers are “a defined and homogeneous group” with health research “of high impact for society”, which will facilitate the evaluation of the project and help determine if the experience has worked.
The institutes that apply to the call will select the groups that want to access the project and “emerging groups” for which the program will reserve quotas, and each selected research team will receive around 100,000 euros per year for four years.
The program will be expanded to the entire system in the next decade. In a second phase, the participation of public research organizations (OPI) such as the CSIC, foundations and mixed centers will be allowed. In a third phase, it will be extended to universities and centers of an autonomous nature.
The minister has also explained that the autonomous communities will be able to form part of the model and participate in its financing, even in this pilot programme.
The objective is to implement it in the next ten years until annual financing of 700 million euros is achieved.
In that time, the ministry has calculated that some 7,000 groups will be financed, 70 percent of the total (in Spain it is estimated that there are some 10,000 scientific research groups).
The minister, who has stressed that the program involves “doubling current funding”, has also recognized that it is “a roadmap”, “a message for the scientific system” that marks the intention of the next socialist government, if it wins the elections .
