Preliminary evaluation of Marie Curie Fellowships awarded
The European Commission, DG XII, has published some preliminary information about the results of the first four calls for applications for Marie Curie research fellowships under the specific programme for the Training and Mobility of Researchers (TMR). The four calls, launched in January, June and September 1995, and March 1996, brought a total of 9,770 applications for Fellowships. Of these, some 1,707 were selected. The TMR management have attempted to improve the processing of applications and the dissemination of information regarding the Fellowships throughout the period. The result of this is that the processing time for applications has been reduced from over seven months to just over four months, despite the large numbers of applications received. The proportion of ineligible proposals received has declined in each call, mainly as a result of improved dissemination of information. In particular, the TMR programme has made extensive use of the World Wide Web, with a large quantity of information now available to researchers anywhere in the world through the TMR home page on the CORDIS Web server. The success rates by scientific discipline were all fairly close, at around 20% of applications received. The success rates varied more by experience levels, however. The greatest success rates were in the established researcher (58%) and return grant (85%) categories. At the PhD and post-doctoral research levels, success rates were much lower, although the bulk of applications were for these categories. At PhD level, success rates ranged from 9% to 14%, according to discipline, while at post-doctoral level, in which the greatest number of applications were received, the success rate varied between 23% and 32%. As regards countries, the highest proportion of applications involved research in the United Kingdom, France and Germany, while the highest numbers of researchers came from Spain, Germany, Italy and France.