Division 3.1.9 Assistance and redress procedures

The ERCEA provides information on the procedure that must be followed by PIs and/or applicant legal entities to address any questions or request for redress^f1 concerning the results of a particular peer review evaluation in relation to any ERC call.

As a minimum any question or request for redress should contain the name of the call, the proposal number (if any), the title of the proposal, and a description of the problems encountered.

For issues regarding the eligibility check and/or the peer review evaluation process of a particular proposal, a redress procedure is set up to report on any shortcoming in the results of the eligibility check or in the way a proposal has been evaluated, likely to have jeopardised the decision whether or not to fund the proposal. A redress committee may be convened to examine the case in question. If the committee is required to consider eligibility issues, it may seek advice of the eligibility review committee (see section 2.2.6). The committee will bring together staff with the requisite scientific/technical and legal expertise. The committee itself, however, does not evaluate the proposal. Depending on the nature of the complaint, the committee may review the CVs of the independent experts, their individual comments, and the ER. The committee will not call into question the scientific judgement of appropriately qualified panels of experts.

In the light of its review, the committee will recommend a course of action to the ERCEA. Should the committee consider that there is evidence to support the complaint, it may suggest a partial or total re-evaluation of the proposal by independent experts.

Any requests for redress must be raised within 1 month of the date of the feedback released on the ERCEA secured web-mail account, as described at section 3.1.8. A detailed redress procedure is described in the Guide for Applicants. Non eligible requests will not be handled by the redress committee.

A reply will be sent to complainants within 3 weeks after the deadline applicable to redress requests, mentioned above. If a definitive reply cannot be given at that stage, the reply will indicate when such a reply will be provided.