Advance information on Research Council of Finland’s winter call funding decisions

The decision dates of the Research Council of Finland’s winter call are approaching. Information on the decisions will be available at research.fi, an online service maintained by the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture. Reforms have also been made in the review of applications submitted to the winter call.

The Research Council of Finland’s Scientific Council for Biosciences, Health and the Environment will make the Academy Project, Academy Research Fellowship and Clinical Researcher decisions on 12 June 2024. The Scientific Council for Social Sciences and Humanities and the Scientific Council for Natural Sciences and Engineering will make their Academy Project and Academy Research Fellowship decisions on 13 June.

The information on the funding decisions will be available at research.fi by 12.00 on the day after the decisions. The Research Council will provide information on the funding decisions at that time. All applicants will receive a personal notification of the decision after the decision meeting.

We will publish the statistics for the winter call on our website in August. The statistics compilations will include organisation-specific statistics, as in previous years, on Academy Projects and Academy Research Fellows. The organisation-specific application statistics (PDF) were published after the winter call closed.

Decision information at research.fi

The Research Council of Finland’s funding decisions will be available at research.fi under Funding calls/Funder: Research Council of Finland and Granted funding/Funder: Research Council of Finland (research.fi instructions in Finnish).

Please note:

• From the winter call onwards, the list of Research Council of Finland funding decisions shows only the name of the site of research as the beneficiary, not the name of the principal investigator. The PI is shown in the decisions details.
• Search results can be sorted by organisation (‘Recipient’).
• Consortium decisions are presented by subproject. By sorting the titles of the decisions in alphabetical order, the consortium’s decisions are listed below each other.
• The search can also be filtered by decision year.
• Decision lists cannot be downloaded in Excel format from research.fi, as the Act governing the service (Research Information Hub Act) does not allow personal data to be downloaded from the service via an open data service. Research operators can access the data in a machine-readable format.
• The Research Council aims to develop visualisations on its website that allow users to make selections from the basic organisation-specific call statistics according to their information needs.

Applicants will receive more detailed feedback from the review

For applicants, the essential changes in the review process concern how the review panel is selected, how the application proceeds to the panel review and what feedback they will receive. Under the new procedure, the feedback to applicants will include all individual expert reviews and ratings. Applicants who proceeded to the panel review stage will also receive the panel summary and the final rating. The review reports include the names of the reviewers.

As a rule, the review report is a secret document under the Finnish Act on the Openness of Government Activities (621/1999). If the review report contains secret content other than content concerning the applicant (e.g. names of reviewers), they may not disclose it to a third party. The names of the experts who participates in the review of applications will be published on the Research Council’s website after all decisions have been made.

Research.fi contains and pools together information on the Finnish research system, publications by Finnish organisations, projects funded by public and private research funders, statistics on research staff and funding, and bibliometric information on publishing. The service is based on a national research information hub, which brings together data maintained by universities, universities of applied sciences, research institutes and research funders in their own services.