The National Science Policy Council has adopted next year’s research innovation strategy, under which HUF 215 billion will be available for Hungarian innovation and research under various funding schemes next year, the Minister of Culture and Innovation said at a press conference held at the Ministry on Tuesday.
Balázs Hankó underlined that next year HUF 131 billion will be allocated to innovation programmes, while HUF 84 billion will be used to fund research projects.
Balázs Hankó also revealed that the National Assembly will vote on Tuesday on the new, consolidated law on the HUN-REN Hungarian Research Network, which would create a flexible organisation operating autonomously from the state budget, meeting the needs of research by renewing the network, and the Hungarian state would purchase the real estate and movable property used by researchers of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and make it available to HUN-REN for the purpose of performing public research tasks.
In addition, a performance-based funding scheme between the Hungarian Research Network and the government could be set up to provide HUF 18 billion on salary improvements for the Hungarian research community next year, doubling funding to reach HUF 97 billion in three years.
The minister also said that the funding available for the National Research Excellence Programme was HUF 19 billion this year, but next year it will be possible to manage this area with a budget of HUF 40 billion. He recalled that while the old OTKA (Hungarian Scientific Research Fund) programme HUF 48 million per research project were available to scientists, next year 100 or even 200 million forints can be spent on funding a research group. Péter Domokos, President of the Research Council of Hungary, stressed that this increase in funding will allow a wider range of researchers to benefit from the funding, which is particularly important as they have had to reject many excellent proposals due to lack of funding.
He added that this year 26 proposals have received funding under the Excellence programme, which aims to provide researchers who have already applied successfully for international funding with the opportunity to prepare for successful participation in European Research Council (ERC) programmes. Under the Advanced research funding scheme, 96 proposals were granted funding, 67 under the Starting programme for young researchers, and 9 under the Hungarian-Austrian and Hungarian-Slovenian international cooperation programmes. Of these, 152 came from the field of natural sciences and 46 were received from the social sciences and humanities.
In response to a journalist’s question, Balázs Hankó commented that the European Commission adopted a decision on Monday that the relevant Hungarian legislation does not adequately address the conflict-of-interest risks related to the boards of trustees of so-called public interest trust foundations. “Brussels is playing sneaky!”, said Balázs Hankó.
He recalled that a proposal on the conflict of interest and fixed term of office, the so-called “cooling-off period” for the members of the Board of Trustees was sent last November.
He pointed out that so far it has been a question of conflict of interest for the members of the Board of Trustees, but now Brussels is deliberately discriminating against Hungarian academics and Hungarians. This is also why the successful Pannonia Scholarship programme will continue, which will help three thousand students to go to the world’s leading universities in the first semester, and the HU-rizon programme, in which Hungarian institutions cooperate with universities such as Stanford and Cambridge.
Source: MTI