The Evaluation Committee of the Estonian Research Council adopted a number of amendments at its meeting on 9 May.
The call for applications 2015 will open on 18 August and close on 19 September 2014. The call for post-doctoral research applications will take place from 1 to 30 September 2014.
The individual written reviews by experts will be made available to the applicants without disclosing the identity of the reviewer.
In order to economise resources the Evaluation Committee adopted a principle that a Principal Investigator whose application in two consecutive calls has failed to reach the thresholds set to different subsections of the application may not submit a proposal for the call 2015.
The Evaluation Committee dismissed the age restriction of 40 years for the Principal Investigator of the start-up grants – the Principal Investigator shall have been awarded his/her first PhD ≥ 2 and ≤ 7 years prior to the opening date of the Call 2015. However, the effective elapsed time since the award of the first PhD can be reduced in certain proporly documented cases (e. g. maternity, paternity, long-term illness, national service).
A clause was added specifying the terms under which not to continue awarding the grant.
Finally, the final report of a research project shall have to include a short popular essay in Estonian describing the research and its outcomes.